Note 10 — Chapter V · [COMPOSED BY STERN.]

That is a noble vocation. To maintain justice, to protect the poor against the powerful, to defend the weak against the superior power of the strong, to recover the ewe-lamb from the folds of the kingly robber:—well, all this makes your heart glow with pleasure at the idea that it is your lot to have so noble a vocation;—and let any one in the interior of Java, who may be sometimes discontented with his situation or pay, consider the sublime duty which devolves upon him, and the glorious delight which the fulfilment of such a duty gives, and he will not be desirous of any other reward. But that duty is by no means easy. In the first place, one has exactly to consider where the use ends, to make room for abuse;—and where the abuse exists, where robbery has indeed been committed by the exercise of arbitrary power, the victims themselves are, for the most part, accomplices, either from extreme submission, or from fear, or from distrust of the will or the power of the man whose duty it is to protect them. Every one knows, that the European officer can be summoned every moment to another employment, and that the Regent, the powerful Regent, remains there. Moreover, there are so many ways of appropriating the property of a poor ignorant man. If a mantrie10 says to him that the Regent wants his horse, the consequence is, that the wished-for animal is soon found in the Regent’s stables; but this does not mean that the Regent does not intend to pay handsomely for it some time or other. If hundreds of people labour on the fields of a chief, without getting money for it, this is no proof that he makes them do so for his benefit. Might it not have been his intention to give them the harvest, having made the philanthropic calculation that his fields were more fertile than theirs, and would much better reward their labour?