Poppy-culture has always been strictly prohibited, although the natives are greatly addicted to opium-smoking, especially in the middle or Hindu provinces. With all their zeal for revenue, the Dutch have resisted the example of the British in India and the Chinese in Szechuen and the western provinces of China, and have never let the land bloom with that seductive flower. The sale of opium is a closely guarded government monopoly, conducted at present under the régie system, the government itself importing all that is consumed in the colony and selling it from fixed offices throughout the island.
Salt-works and tin-mines were managed in as systematic and profitable a way as crops and cultures. No private individual was allowed to make or import salt into the colony. The government still holds the salt-supply as a monopoly, and there are large salt-works on Madura Island, where the natives are required to deliver fixed quantities of coarse salt at the government warehouses at the rate (in 1897) of ten gulden the kojan (1853 kilograms). The government manages the tin-mines on Banka Island in the Java Sea, while the mines of the neighboring Billeton Island are leased to private individuals.
IX
THE “CULTURE SYSTEM” (Continued)
The culture system, as an experiment in colonial government and finance, was the greatest success and worked incalculable benefits to the islands and the native people, as well as to the assisted colonists and the crown of Holland. Great stretches of jungle were cleared and brought under cultivation, and more money was paid in wages directly to native cultivators and mill workmen each year than all the natives paid in taxes to the government. The Javanese acquired better homes, much personal wealth, and improved in all the conditions of living. The population increased tenfold during the half-century that the culture system was in operation—this alone an unanswerable reply to all critics and detractors, who declaimed against the oppression and outrage upon the Javanese. As the island became, under this system, a more profitable possession than it had been under the real tyranny exercised during the days of close-trade monopoly, the envy and attention of all the other colonizing nations of Europe were drawn to this new departure in colonial government. Spain copied the system in its tobacco-growing in the Philippine Islands, but could not follow further. Philanthropic and pharisaical neighbors, political economists, advanced political thinkers, humanitarians, and sentimentalists, all addressed themselves to the subject, and usually condemned the culture system in unmeasured terms. Holland’s voluntary abolition of slavery in its East India possessions by no means stilled the storm of invective and abuse. Leaders, speeches, books, pamphlets, even novels,[2] showed up the horrors, the injustice and iniquities said to be perpetrated in Java. It was shown that almost nothing of the great revenues from the island was devoted to the education or benefit of the natives; that no mission or evangelical work was undertaken, or even allowed, by this foremost Protestant people of Europe; and that next to nothing in the way of public works or permanent improvements resulted to the advantage of those who toiled for the alien, absentee landlord, i. e., the crown of Holland,—the country being drained of its wealth for the benefit of a distant monarch. It was estimated that between 1831 and 1877 the natives were mulcted of one billion, seven hundred million francs by the forced labor exacted from them, and the sales of their produce to the government at the low market prices fixed by the purchaser. By continued philippics and exaggerated accusations, the names of Dutch government and Java planter became, to the average European, synonyms for all of rapacity, tyranny, extortion, and cruelty, and there was an impression that something worse than Spanish persecution in the Netherlands, in the name of religion, was being carried on by the Hollanders in Java in the name of the almighty florin. All the iniquities and horrors of the Dutch management of the cinnamon-gardens of Ceylon, and all the infamy of the Dutch East India Company’s misrule in Java during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were stupidly mixed up with and charged against the comparatively admirable, the orderly and excellently devised culture system of Governor Van den Bosch. Contractor planters vainly urged that the only tyranny and oppression of the people came from their own village chiefs; but philanthropists pointed steadily to the colonial government and the system which inspired and upheld the village tyrants.
A VIEW IN BUITENZORG