In 1859 Mr. J. W. B. Money, a Calcutta barrister, visited Java, made exhaustive search and inquiry into every branch and detail of the culture system’s working, and put the results in book form inwoven with a comparison with the less intelligent and successful management of the land and labor question in British India, where, with sixteen times the area and twelve times the population of Java, the revenue is only four times as great. His book, “Java: How to Manage a Colony” (London, Hurst & Blackett, 1861), is a most complete and reliable résumé of the subject, and his opinions throughout were an indorsement of the Van den Bosch culture system. He contrasted warmly the failure and inefficiency of the British India ryot warree, or land system, with the established communal system which the Oriental prefers and is fitted for, and showed how a similar culture system in Bengal and Madras would have worked to the advantage, benefit, and profit of Hindustan, the Hindus, and the British crown. Mr. Money especially noted how the Dutch refrained from interfering with native prejudices and established customs; how the prestige of the native aristocracy was as carefully maintained as that of the white race, with no modern, Western notions of equality, even before the law, the Dutch securing regentship to the leading noble of a district, and giving him more revenue and actual power than were possible under the native emperor. Mr. Money noted only the best of feeling apparently existing between natives and Europeans, a condition dating entirely from the establishment of the culture system, and the general prosperity that succeeded. “No country in the East can show so rich or so contented a peasantry as Java,” he said.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who visited Java several times between 1854 and 1862, while the culture system was at the height of its successful working, spoke in approval and praise of what he saw of the actual system and its results, and commended it as the only means of forcing an indolent, tropical race to labor and develop the resources and industries of the island. His was one of the few clear, dispassionate, and intelligent statements given on that side, and he summed up his observations in the declaration that Java was “the very garden of the East, and perhaps, upon the whole, the richest, best-cultivated, and the best-governed island in the world.”
The competition of French beet-sugar, fed by large government bounties of West Indian and Hawaiian sugars, so reduced the price of sugar in Europe that in 1871 the Dutch government began to withdraw from the sugar-trade, and by 1890 had no interest in nor connection with any of the many mills which colonists had built on the island. Java ranked second only to Cuba in the production of cane-sugar, and now (1897) ranks first in the world. Trade returns now show sugar exports to the value of six million pounds sterling from the private plantations of Java and Sumatra each year, and the distillation of arrack for the trade with Norway and Sweden is an important business.
At the time that sugar began to fall in price, owing to Western competition, Brazilian and Central American coffees began to command a place in the European market and to reduce prices; and then the blight, which reached Sumatra in 1876, attacked Java plantations in 1879, and spread slowly over the island, ruining one by one all the plantations of the choice Arabian or Mocha coffee-trees. As the area of thriving plantations decreased, and acres and acres of the white skeletons of blighted trees belted the hillsides, vain attempts were made at replanting. Only the tough, woody, coarse African or Liberian coffee-tree, with its large leaves and large, flat berries,—a plant which thrives equally in a damp or a dry climate, and luxuriates in the poorest, stoniest ground,—seems to be proof against the blight that devastated the Ceylon and Java coffee-plantations so thoroughly at the same time. Many of the old coffee-plantations in Java, as in Ceylon, were burned over and planted to tea; yet in many places in the Preangers one sees the bleached skeletons of Arabian trees still standing, and the abandoned plantations smothered in weeds and creepers, and fast relapsing to jungle. The virgin soil of Sumatra has so far escaped the severest attacks of the blight, and the center of coffee-production there is near Padang, on the west coast, whence the bulk of the crop goes directly to England or America in British ships.
The blight forced the Dutch government to begin its retirement from the coffee-trade, and but the smallest fraction of the coffee exported now goes from government plantations or warehouses. Nearly all the Sumatra plantations are owned or leased by private individuals, and the greater part of coffee lands in Java are cultivated by independent planters, who sell their crop freely in the open market. With the wholesale replanting of the Liberian tree in place of the Arabian, and the shipping only of the large, flat Liberian bean instead of the Mocha’s small, round berry, it is questionable whether the little real “government Java” that goes to market is entitled to the name which won the esteem of coffee-drinking people for the century before the blight. The Dutch government still raises and sells coffee, but under strong protest and opposition in Holland, and as a temporary concession during these times of financial straits.
Public opinion was gradually aroused in Holland, and opponents of the culture system at last spoke out in the States-General; but not until the prices of sugar and coffee had fallen seriously, and the blight had ruined nearly all the government coffee-plantations, did the stirring of Holland’s conscience bid the government retire from trade and agriculture, and leave the development of the island’s resources, in natural and legitimate ways, to the enterprise of the many European settlers then established in permanence in Java, who had begun to see that the government was their most serious rival and competitor in the market.
The common sense and cooler vision of these days since its abandonment have shown that the culture system was an inspiration, a stroke of administrative genius of the first order, accomplishing in a few decades, for the material welfare of the island and its people, what the native race of a tropical country never could or would have done in centuries. The American mind naturally puzzles most over the idea that twenty odd millions of people of one race, language, and religion should ever have submitted to be ruled by a mere handful of over-sea usurpers and speculators. Considering the genius and characteristics of all Asiatic people, their superstitions, fatalism, self-abasement, and continuous submission to alien conquests and despotisms, which all their histories record and their religions almost seem to enjoin, and remembering the successive Buddhist, Brahmanic, and Mohammedan conquests and conversions of Java, and the domestic wars of three centuries since Islam’s invasion, the half-century of the culture system’s prosperous trial seems a most fortunate epoch and the cause of the admirable and surprising conditions existing to-day in that model garden and hothouse of the world.
It was much regretted later that some part of the culture system’s enormous profits was not devoted to railway construction and the making of the new harbor for Batavia at Tandjon Priok, as, immediately after the system’s abandonment, railways and the new harbor became more urgent needs, and had to be provided for out of the current revenues, then taxed with the vigorous beginning of the Achinese struggle—Holland’s thirty years’ war in the Indies, which has so sadly crippled the exchequer. In order to provide a crown revenue in lieu of the sugar and coffee sales, a poll-tax was imposed on the natives in place of the seventh of their labor given to culture-system crops, and increased taxes were levied on lands and property; but through the extensive public works, the long-continued Achinese war in Sumatra, and the little war with the Sassaks in Lombok (1894), the deficits in the colonial budgets have become more ominous every year since 1876. The crown of Holland no longer receives a golden stream from the Indies, and is pushed to devise means to meet its obligations.
The culture system brought to Java a selected lot of refined, intelligent, capable, energetic colonists, who, settling there in permanence and increasing their holdings and wealth, have become the most numerous and important body of Europeans on the island. The great sugar and coffee barons, the patriarchal rulers of vast tea-gardens, the kina and tobacco kings, really rule Netherlands India. The planters and the native princes have much in common, and in the Preangers these horse-racing country gentlemen affiliate greatly and make common social cause against the small aristocracy of office-holders, who have been wont to regard the native nobles and the mercantile communities of the ports from on high.