re was catechising and preaching. There was also a service on Sunday
morning. The children were all taught in Malay, and I often heard them
repeating the multiplication-table, up to twenty times twenty, very
glibly. They always wound up with singing, and it was very pleasing to
hear many of our old psalm-tunes in these remote mountains, sung with
Malay words. Singing is one of the real blessings which Missionaries
introduce among savage nations, whose native chants are almost always
monotonous and melancholy.

On catechising evenings the schoolmaster was a great man, preaching and
teaching for three hours at a stretch much in the style of an English
ranter. This was pretty cold work for his auditors, however warming to
himself; and I am inclined to think that these native teachers, having
acquired facility of speaking and an endless supply of religious
platitudes to talk about, ride their hobby rather hard, without much
consideration for their flock. The Missionaries, however, have much
to be proud of in this country. They have assisted the Government in
changing a savage into a civilized community in a wonderfully short
space of time. Forty years ago the country was a wilderness, the people
naked savages, garnishing their rude houses with human heads. Now it is
a garden, worthy of its sweet native name of "Minahasa." Good roads
and paths traverse it in every direction; some of the finest coffee
plantations in the world surround the villages, interspersed with
extensive rice-fields more than sufficient for the support of the
population.

The people are now the most industrious, peaceable, and civilized in the
whole Archipelago. They are the best clothed, the best housed, the best
fed, and the best educated; and they have made some progress towards
a higher social state. I believe there is no example elsewhere of such
striking results being produced in so short a time--results which are
entirely due to the system of government now adopted by the Dutch in
their Eastern possessions. The system is one which may be called a
"paternal despotism." Now we Englishmen do not like despotism--we hate
the name and the thing, and we would rather see people ignorant,
lazy, and vicious, than use any but moral force to make them wise,
industrious, and good. And we are right when we are dealing with men of
our own race, and of similar ideas and equal capacities with ourselves.
Example and precept, the force of public opinion, and the sl