Letters of a Javanese Princess

by Raden Adjeng Kartini

If you will always love and trust us, little Mother, you will make us happy. We thank you again and again, for your love and sympathy. You see we are answering your letter at once, and we shall put it away and keep it as a sacred relic!

We pray and entreat you, think no more about our happiness. We have told you so often that it is not our own happiness we seek, but that of others.

When we go to Europe, we do not expect to gather roses for ourselves.

I protest we expect nothing of Europe—nothing of the "happiness" of which European girls dream, nor do we expect that we will find much friendship and sympathy there, or that we will feel at home in a strange environment. We hope only for one thing, to find there knowledge and enlightenment. It will not matter if we do not find it gay in Europe, if we but receive there what we seek.

We do not expect the European world to make us happier. The time has long gone by when we seriously believed that the European is the only true civilization, supreme and unsurpassed.

Forgive us, if we say it, but do you yourself think the civilization of Europe perfect? We should be the last not to see and appreciate the great good that is in your world, but will you not acknowledge that there is also much that brings the very name of civilization into ridicule?

We complain about pettiness and smallness of soul in our own surroundings; do not imagine for a moment that we think that in Holland we shall not find pettiness too.

You know better than we, that among the thousands that are called civilized by the world, only a very few are that in reality. That a broad mind is not possessed by every European from whom it might be expected. And even in the most elegant, exclusive and brilliant salons; prejudice, intolerance and short sightedness are no infrequent visitors.

We do not think of Holland as an ideal country, not in the least. Judging from what we have seen of the Hollanders here, we can certainly reckon upon much in that small, cold country that will wound our sensibilities and bitterly grieve us. We Javanese are reproached as born liars, wholly untrustworthy, and we are called ingratitude personified. We have not only read this many times, but we have heard it spoken aloud, and that was a fair test of the speaker's delicacy of feeling.

We only smile when we read or hear such pleasantries, we think to ourselves of European society life which often gives glaring proof of the truth and sincerity of those who sit in high places and look down with scorn upon the lying, untrustworthy Javanese.