irty-five millions.

Java is the jewel of the Dutch Crown, one of the most fertile and
productive islands of the world. Coffee and tea, rice and sugar, salt
and spice, tobacco and corn, coal and oil, coconut and rubber, are
exported in an aggregate of two hundred millions of our dollars every
year, while the aggregate of imports is little more than a hundred and
twenty millions. The Dutch have taken a colony whose deficits once
frightened the English into abandoning it, and by the famous "culture
system" of letting out the land upon wise conditions as to the kind and
quantity of production, have turned the whole island into a veritable
garden, and a principal source of revenue for Holland. The Dutch indeed
have drawn from Java much more than they have given. The Roman Empire
should have taught them that incorporation of a colony, and privilege
granted to it, were the only security for permanent possession. Until
ten years ago, however, the Dutch policy was one of repression rather
than one of development. While Britain has tried by her schools and
hospitals to Anglicize India, Holland, for many years, tried to keep the
Javanese apart and in subjection, discouraging their study of the Dutch
language and giving them also no share in the government. This policy
has at last been seen to be suicidal; Chinese immigration has added an
element of vigor, industry, and discontent; the modern movement in India
and in Japan has provoked new aspirations here; even the Malay has
become aware that he has rights. Dutch schools have at last begun to
educate the people; the more progressive among the students are also
learning English; and Java now bids fair to press forward to occupy a
position in the van of national and democratic progress.

I am deeply impressed with the density and vastness of this population.
Only Belgium surpasses Java in the number of inhabitants to the square
mile. We have taken a ride by rail for four hundred miles through the
center of the island. We have passed volcanoes actually smoking; for a
long range of mountains, rising sometimes to a height of twelve thousand
feet, constitutes the back-bone of Java. There are sublime and
beautiful landscapes all along the way, sublime because of their
occasionally rocky grandeur, and beautiful because of the minute
cultivation that adorns both hillside and plain. The endless
rice-fields, and the fields of sugar-cane that stretch for miles like a
billowy sea, make a rai