ion,
as evidenced by the four bloody uprisings in the last three-quarters of
a century--the last was in 1908--which were suppressed only with
difficulty and considerable loss of life. When the shells from the
gunboats began to burst over their towns, the rajahs, recognizing that
their cause was lost, nerved themselves with opium and committed the
traditional _puputan_, or, with their wives, threw themselves on the
Dutch bayonets. But, though the Balinese have bowed perforce to the
authority of the stout young woman who dwells in The Hague, they have
none of the cringing servility, that look of pathetic appeal such as
you see in the eyes of dogs which have been mistreated, so
characteristic of the Javanese.

Though the three-quarters of a million natives in Bali have behind them
the traditions of countless wars, the Dutch, who seem to possess an
extraordinary talent for governing brown-skinned peoples, maintain
their authority with a few companies of native soldiery officered by a
handful of Europeans. The success of the Dutch in ruling Malays, who
are notoriously turbulent and warlike, is largely due to the fact that,
so long as the customs of the natives are not inimical to good
government or to their own well-being, they studiously refrain from
interfering with them. Nor is there the same social chasm separating
Europeans and natives in the Insulinde which is found in Britain's
Eastern possessions. Were a British official in India to marry a native
woman he would be promptly recalled in disgrace; if a Dutch official
marries a native woman she is accorded the same social recognition as
her husband. Though in the old days probably ninety per cent of the
Dutch officials and planters in the Insulinde lived with native women,
these unions are constantly decreasing, today probably not more than
ten per cent of the Europeans thus solving their domestic problems. It
struck me, moreover, that the Dutch are more in sympathy with their
native subjects, that they understand them better, than the British. It
is a remarkable thing, when you stop to think of it, that a little
nation like Holland, with a colonial army of less than thirty-five
thousand men and no fleet worthy of the name, should be able to
maintain its authority over fifty millions of natives, ten thousand
miles away, with so little friction.

We passed the night in the small rest-house at Den Pasar which the
government maintains for the use of its officials. I have