viir.] MR. WALLACE ON TEE DUTCH SYSTEM. 181 



coffee has all to be sold to Government at less than half the price that the 

 local merchant would give for it, and he consequently cries out loudly 

 against 'monopoly' and 'oppression.' He forgets, however, that the 

 coffee -plantations were established by the Government at great outlay of 

 capital and skill ; that it gives free education to the people, and that the 

 monopoly is in lieu of taxation. He forgets that the product he wants to 

 purchase and make a profit by is the creation of the Government, without 

 whom the people would stiU be savages. He knows very well that free trade 

 would, as its first result, lead to the importation of whole cargoes of arrack, 

 which would be carried over the country and exchanged for coffee ; that 

 drunkenness and poverty would spread over the land ; that the public coffee- 

 plantations woiLld not be kept up ; that the quality and quantity of the 

 coffee woidd soon deteriorate ; that traders and merchants would get rich, 

 Ijut that the people would I'elapse into poverty and barbarism. That such is 

 invariably the result of free trade with any savage tribes who possess a 

 valuable product, native or cultivated, is well known to those who have 

 visited such people ; but we might even anticipate from general principles 

 that e\al results would happen. If there is one thing rather than another to 

 which the grand law of continuity or development will apply, it is to human 

 progress. There are certain stages through which society must pass in its 

 onward march from barbarism to civilisation. Now one of these stages has 

 always been some form or other of despotism, such as feudalism or serWtude 

 or a despotic paternal Government, and we have every reason to believe that 

 it is not possible for humanity to leap over tlris transition epoch, and pass at 

 once from pure savagery to free civilisation. The Dutch system attemjits to 

 supply this missing link, and to Ijring the people on by gradual steps to that 

 higher civilisation which we (the English) try to force upon them at once. 

 Our system has always failed. We demoralise and we extirpate, but we 

 never really ci\dlise. Whether the Dutch system can permanently succeed is 

 bi\t doubtful, since it may not be possible to compress the work of ten 

 centuries into one ; but at all events it takes nature as a guide, and is 

 therefore more deserving of success, and more likely to succeed, than ours." 



Wherever we went in Minahasa we found a contented, happy 

 people, amongst whom drunkenness and crime were almost non- 

 existent. The land was higlily cultivated, the -sTllages neater and 

 cleaner than I have seen them in any part of the ciWKsed world. 

 Schools were established in every district, and the natives were 

 almost without exception Christians. Where can we, who call 

 ourselves the greatest colonising nation in the world, point to a 



