The Amsterdam “Handelsblad” remarks that, “as far as the Dutch possessions are concerned, coercion and monopoly indeed must go. People who cannot see this betimes will find out their mistake rather suddenly.”
That sage socialist, Élisée Reclus, remarks that “once more it appears that monopoly ends in the ruin not only of the despoilers, but of the state.”
X
SINAGAR
Scientists and lay tourists have equally exhausted their adjectives in laudations of Java, Miss Marianne North calling it “one magnificent garden of luxuriance, surpassing Brazil, Jamaica, and Sarawak combined”; and Alfred Russel Wallace epitomizing it after this fashion: “Taking it as a whole, and surveying it from every point of view, Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world.... The most fertile, productive, and populous island in the tropics.” Lesser folk have been as sweeping in their superlatives, and all agree that, of all exiled cultivators in the far parts of the world, the Java planter is most to be envied, leading, as he does, the ideal tropical life, the one best worth living, in a land where over great areas it is always luxurious, dreamy afternoon, and in the beautiful hill-country is always the fresh, breezy, dewy summer forenoon of the rarest June.
The most favored and the most famous plantations are those around Buitenzorg and in the Preanger regencies, which lie on the other side of Gedeh and Salak, those two sleeping volcanoes that look down upon their own immediate foot-hills and valleys, to see those great, rolling tracts all cultivated like a Haarlem tulip-bed. Above the cacao limit, tea-gardens, coffee-estates, and kina-plantations cover all the land lying between the altitudes of two thousand and four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The owners of these choicest bits of “the Garden of the East” lead an existence that all other planters of growing crops, and most people who value the creature comforts, the luxuries of life, and nature’s opulence, may envy. The climate of the hills is all that Sybarite could wish for,—a perpetual 70° by day, with light covering required at night,—the warm sun of the tropics tempering the fresh mountain air to an eternal mildness, in which the human animal thrives and luxuriates quite as do all the theobromas and caffein plants in the ground. In the near circle of these two great peaks there is no really dry season, despite the southeast monsoon of the conventional summer months. Every day in the year enjoys its shower, swept from one mountain or the other; and the heavy thunderstorms at the change of the monsoons and during the winter rainy season are the joy of the planter’s heart, shaking out myriads of young tea-leaves by their jar and rushing winds, and freshening the coffee-trees like a tonic. As every day has its shower, each day has its tea-crop gathered and cured in this favorable region; and that profitable industry is as continuous and unchanging as the seasons on the Preanger hillsides, and paramount there, now that coffee is no longer king.
The two great plantations of Sinagar and Parakan Salak, principalities of twelve and fifteen thousand acres respectively, that lie in the valley between Salak and Gedeh, are the oldest and the model tea-gardens of Java, the show-places of the Preangers. Parong Koeda and Tjibitad, an hour beyond Buitenzorg, are practically private railway-stations for these two great estates. The post-road from Tjibitad to Sinagar follows the crest of a ridge, and gives magnificent views between its shade-trees over twenty miles of rolling country, cultivated to the last acre. Blue vapors were tumbling in masses about the summit of Salak the afternoon we coursed along the avenues of shade-trees, and the low growls of distant thunder gave promise of the regular afternoon benefit shower to the thirsty plants and trees that ridged every slope and level with lines of luxuriant green. The small ponies scampered down an avenue of magnificent kanari-trees, with a village of basket houses like to those of Lilliput at the base of the lofty trunks, and, with a rush and a sudden turn around tall shrubbery, brought up before the low white bungalow, where the master of Sinagar sat in his envied ease under such vines and trees as would form a mise en scène for an ideal, generally acceptable paradise. A sky-line of tall areca-palms, massed flame-trees, and tamarinds, with vivid-leafed bougainvillea vines pouring down from one tree-top and mantling two or three lesser trees, filled the immediate view from the great portico-hall, or living-room, where the welcoming cups of afternoon tea were at once served.