CHAPTER XIX.
NETHERLANDS INDIA.
As the Dutch have administered in what they call Netherlands India, a colonial system quite different in its methods from the systems adopted by other nations, I have thought it worth while to make some inquiries concerning it.
The Malay archipelago, which might almost be described as a continent cut up into islands, has furnished a farm on which several nations have experimented in colonialism, but the Dutch, both in length of occupancy and in the number of people subjected to their rule, are easily first. The archipelago is more than four thousand miles long from east to west, and if the Philippine Islands are included, thirteen hundred miles wide. Some of the islands are larger than European states; Borneo and New Guinea each have an area greater than the British Isles. On the map the islands of the archipelago look like stepping stones connecting Asia with Australia, but some writers, arguing from the fauna and flora as well as from the depths of the surrounding waters, contend that the western islands are an extension of Asia and the eastern ones an extension of Australia. Alfred Russell Wallace, for instance, points out that the animals, birds and natural products of the two sections differ so much as to suggest that one group is much older than the other.
This archipelago is the home of one of the branches into which the human family is divided, viz., the Malay or brown race. These people are distinct in appearance, and in many of their characteristics, from the yellow and black races as well as from the white race. There are in some of the islands remnants of aboriginal tribes, but the Malays from time immemorial have furnished the prevailing type. They have shown themselves capable of continuous and systematic labor where they have been subjected to coercion, or where a sufficient inducement has been presented as a stimulus; but the depressing influence of a continuous summer, added to the bounty of the tropics, has naturally made them less industrious than those who live in the temperate zone. The clothing required by the Malay is insignificant in amount and value. The little children are bare and seem to enjoy a shower as much as ducks do. In Sourabaya, the second city in Java, we saw a group of them naked, sliding on their stomachs on a marble floor of an open porch during a heavy rain. This seemed a fairly satisfactory substitute for the ice ponds of the north.
The adults, both men and women, wear a sarong (except when the men content themselves with a breech cloth). The sarong, a simple strip of cloth, is draped about the figure with all the fullness in front and fastened in some mysterious way without the aid of buttons, hooks or pins. This garment, if garment it may be called, gives opportunity for the exercise of taste, and the range in price is sufficient to permit of some extravagance in dress. The best native sarongs are more expensive than silk, the cloth being overlaid with wax, upon which the pattern is traced, and the dyes applied by hand. The masses use a cheap cotton print manufactured in Europe. One of the striking peculiarities of Javanese life is the adoption of the sarong by the European women for morning wear. Ladies who appear at dinner in full evening dress may be seen on the balconies and streets in the morning hours clad in loose hanging sarongs and thin dressing sacques, their bare feet encased in sandals. On the Dutch boat upon which we left Batavia we saw posted notices designating the hours during which the sarong could be worn, and giving permission to men to wear a pajama-like outfit during the same hours.
A NATIVE.