Stories from Deli

1914, Augusta de Wit

I first saw a tobacco field in May, flowering and harvest time was also. The pale red haze of the blossom spread in long streaks over the coarse, large-leaved green of the hill fields. And everywhere, among the high shrubs where they plucked the leaves, on the bright sunny paths along which they carried the full baskets to the drying shed, the Chinese coolie people were at work. In the barns, cool and dark to those who entered from the blazing sunshine, the Javanese women sat threading the leaves on thin bamboo sticks. From the ridge of the high barn to a man’s height above the floor, it was full of fringed foliage, fresh green, fading green, yellow, pale, fine brown; and the smell of tobacco made the air stinging.

I came back in July; then the ‘sanding time’ had started. The people who had walked scattered over the vast fields were gathered in the center of the enterprise: the great fermentation barn; and in the fermenting barn, too, was the tobacco, which had grown in those fields, and had dried up in all the drying barns. In rows of mighty mountains and mites, stacked up like hay shells, the harvest was piled up from one end of the almost immense long barn to the other; and along the walls, in a double row around it, five hundred Chinese sat sorting the leaf by length and by color; while a multitude of women on the raised floor in the middle moved to and fro between scalding piles of tobacco, which were broken down and rebuilt in another arrangement of the bundles of leaves. In a separate part of the barn sat the judges, Chinese men, Javanese women, to whom the sorters of the tobacco came to show their work; without speaking a word, with a gesture that was at once quick and calm, they accepted, looked at and approved or disapproved, throwing the bundles to two sides. And the Chinese accountant behind his desk wrote down from each coolie what was due to him in wages. Soon the latter would have been paid for the final work, and the tobacco, packed in the mats woven in Borneo, would be brought on board the steamship that brought the goods to the Amsterdam auction.

The tobacco that was then treated in the fermentation barn was sown in December and transplanted in February and March. The plant had then been used for fifty-five days to reach full maturity and bloom. May had been the time for harvesting. It had taken twenty days for the green leaves in the drying sheds to turn brown; two months before the stacks were fermented for the first time, and another two times six weeks before being sorted and fermented for the second time. In nine months, the company’s cycle was completed. And already in the field the workers were already at work preparing the fields for a new harvest.

Apart from pressing to bale the tobacco, all the work on plant and product in those nine or ten months is done by hand. The business is simple, especially compared to the sugar. But instead of the complications of mechanical work and chemical investigations, it has no less objections of a different nature, in part from the cultivation itself, in part from local conditions, the inevitable consequence.

The cultivation of tobacco requires, according to the judgment of the planters, a rest period of eight years for the field after each harvest. This necessitates a constant relocation of the houses for the assistants and the coolies and of the sheds for drying the leaves. The buildings can remain standing for three years: the soil on either side of the ‘planting roads’ on which the crop is grown is divided into three strips, which are planted one after the other. Once the harvest has been removed from the third field strip, the move-in-one begins. A new piece is being worked on land that has lain fallow for eight years: and with the work the workers and the working tools go there. To this periodic relocation is added an annual one: in the ‘scissoring time’ all assistants (except one, who supervises the people, that remains with the fieldwork) to live in the houses located on the ‘yard,’ ie the grounds around the administrator’s house, the fermentation shed, the office and the coolie camp. These many relocations (one of the causes which have for a long time made it impossible for the assistants to start a regular household and a family life) require much time, the labor of a great multitude of people, and great expenditure.

As a result of the native nature of the region, uninhabitable wilderness as it was: the absence of indigenous workers, and the necessity of working with foreign-imported workers of different and partly hostile nationalities. That was the great difficulty now fifty years ago, and that is the great difficulty today. And the fear of many is that it will remain the great difficulty, and may become even greater! – in the future.

If we take as the average size of an enterprise at 4000 construction (of which always only ⅛ under construction under the prevailing system of buildings), then it is necessary, working under an administrator and of four to six employees, a people of a thousand workers, men and women. women, half of whom have families. Of those thousand, five hundred are Chinese, men only. The other five hundred, all or nearly all married, male and female workers, are Javanese, Buginese, Boyans, Bandjarese, Bataks, people of the west coast of Sumatra, Klingaleese and Sikhs. Of these many races each has its own kind of work, to which it adheres, as well as its own customs and morals which it wants to see respected, and its own prejudices which make living and working separate from all others a necessity,

The Chinese are by far the best workers and can be entrusted with the work that requires the greatest care. The Chinese live separately, both at the time of the fieldwork and during the barn time, and obey their own overseers, ‘tandils,’ who are again under a head tandil. She have a temple on the enterprise; and a theater (built in the style of the seventeenth-century theaters of London) and a playhouse just for himself. But that separation from the outside is not done: they are also separated from each other. Chinese of three races come to Deli: Hailokhong, Teoetjoe (pronounced tjautjoe) and Keh. Hailokhong and Teoetjoe are real farmers; Keh are craftsmen; Hailokhong and Teoetjoe look despicable on Keh. To this distant divide has recently been added the new one between old Chinese and young Chinese, imperialist and republican. Furthermore, all are passionate players, without distinction, and their only game is the dice, so that those who sit like good friends around the mat on which the hexagonal spinning top rotates. Maybe fly to each other’s throats like mortal enemies at the end of the game. The clerk and his assistants must be prepared to avoid murder and manslaughter during nighttime riots in the playhouse.

The Javanese are mainly ground workers, while the women do the light work. They live in their own kampong, where everything is arranged in Javanese style; as government subjects do not have their own administration, but they do have their own mandoers and also their own fields for rice cultivation. They play dice just as much as the Chinese and are much deeper than them in gambling debts. They are more or less married among each other (often less) and that state of unstable marital equilibrium causes strange dips, especially if the equilibrium disturbers are, as happens often, Chinese.

The Boyans (people of Bawean) are house builders, and good at their job, but all too slow. The slowness means that they have to leave the field for the more convenient Bandjarese. There are many in the enterprises, foresters, loggers, carpenters, who have their jobs in the steady demolition and rebuilding. They sometimes give as reason for the move to Deli: aversion to the gentlemen’s services that are demanded on Borneo (which, however, are not heavy according to official data). The nature of their work allows them long times of freedom, which they use for cultivation of land, against payment of a rent in crop rented from the enterprise. They work under their own mandur, but (as government subjects) do not have their own administration.

Bataks work in crowds on the tobacco fields. They have their own villages there, in which they live under their own administration, just as on the Plateau. Their beautiful architectural style has already suffered greatly from the move to this new environment, which on the other hand has a favorable effect on some harmful traditions, such as tooth-filing, for example. They maintain one bad habit with particular tenacity: writing fire letters. The clerk who one day finds a bamboo canister hanging from his house or a tobacco shed with a miniature wooden knife and torch as symbols of manslaughter and arson, understands that there is a Batak at the company who has grievances. It need not be grievances against him, the clerk, or even one of the employees: they may as well be a mandur, another coolie, a fellow villager of the threatener. But in any case, the clerk is the endangered: he must see to it that the complaint, whatever it may be, is removed.

The Klingaleese who come from Madras and Pondicherry on their own account, live in kongsies, below a head of his own, the blade-tandil. They are carters and keepers of the livestock, and as such good workmen. But they are a nuisance because of their incorrigible alcoholism. The other British Indians, Bengali and Afghans, are errands and night watchmen. An Afghan, tallly built, with fierce eyes looking out of a proudly-circumcised face, and still taller and more proud through the high white turban, is an imposing sight to whom Natives and Chinese alike feel awe. This is useful for his night watchman duty and no less for his trade of loan sharks. Who would dare refuse such an imposing personality twenty percent interest a month? Much honor than against him the coolie will rise against the mandur who disapproves of his work, or against the employee who has him punished for laziness.

This and such then are the workers in the tobacco fields. And to see lightly is the difficulty for the leaders of an enterprise, a culture simple in itself, with them, so that the work proceeds its regular course and serious clashes are avoided, both between employer and employee and between the workers themselves. .

About the evil opportunities to which the tobacco culture is subject, opportunities dependent on the climate, the market, and the workforce, are officially announced by the Planters’ Association in a few figures. Of the 125 companies set up for forty years, representing a combined capital of 104 million, no fewer than 83 have been liquidated or have ceased operations, with a capital of 51 million. And of the remaining 42 there are but 13 with a capital of 23 million, whose proportions are above par; it is true very high up there.

The good chances facing the evil one come true in that high course.

Balancing the two against each other, a well-known authority on the tobacco culture in Deli and its history has pronounced his final verdict: that in the whole tobacco, so far, more money had been lost than won.

 The history of Deli is reduced in size and in accelerated a repetition of that of the Dutch East Indies; and as for the colony, there was a time for the region when especially those who went there, who had nowhere else to go. For Deli, those days have not long since passed; Twelve, fifteen years ago it was still often enough, and with good reason, said of young men of better standing, “too decent for Deli.” People don’t hear that anymore. The interaction of better conditions and better people, begun about 1900, has changed the situation favorably. Now that the fatal ban on marriage, dating from a time of primitive conditions in one and short-sighted self-interest in the other, has been largely or entirely lifted, thanks to the courage of the former, who risked their careers to defend their human right; now that, even by those who do not become administrators, decent money is being made again; now that good roads have come, easy communion with Medan, railroad, telegraph, telephone; and medical assistance, the best available in the whole of India, is readily available: now young men of good education and conduct are also coming to Deli, as if to a suitable job. They earn much more from tobacco than from tea or coffee; and, there it now also young men of good education and good behavior come to Deli, as if to a suitable job. They earn much more from tobacco than from tea or coffee; and, there it now also young men of good education and good behavior come to Deli, as if for a suitable job. They earn much more from tobacco than from tea or coffee; and, there it number of employees on a tobacco company is from four to six, while the complicated sugar company claims three and four times the number on a factory, “tobacco assistants” are as much more likely to become administrators as “sugar employees.”

However, one drawback – and it is a very bad one – scares many of Deli: the insecurity. It has always been there: coolies attacks on Europeans have occurred from the beginning. But they have become relatively more frequent just recently, as the causes of the coolies’ hatred against the European leaders of the company have diminished.

This is indirectly a consequence, a sad consequence, of a good and joyful cause: the awakening of the Oriental.

The new ideas, it is true, take on eccentric forms in that for the great majority still totally uneducated brains. It can be heard, among Chinese, that a recently (on the west coast of Sumatra) introduced by the Dutch East Indies government must serve to pay the Chinese the “blood money” for the victims of the last troubled in Surabaya. And the Malay newspapers dare not bring their subscribers other than victory reports of the battle that the Controller of the Faithful is waging against Italy. But however wonderfully fused, the idea is there and is immovable, that the Oriental, long despised and enslaved, has thrown off the yoke of the Westerner, and now stands before him as one man over against another: equals. So that,

The Labor set to mention it casually, following facts not happened in Deli – it was the coolie assaults in Redjang Lebong that triggered the foundation – the labor inspectorate, which has even been accused of partiality towards the coolies, makes its own direction superfluous, as well as it is in itself illegal. But the coolie seldom, if ever, sees that. All too often, he attributes a verdict in his favor rather than a sense of justice to fear, and at best finds an incentive to do justice to himself a next time rather than wait for it from the hand of those who need it anyway.

Perhaps this circumstance is also to blame for such counterproductive ideas, that the inspectors for traffic with the many language-speaking coolies use interpreters: going on such a detour much can get lost or go wrong. In conclusion, there is a dangerously high chance that the coolie’s self-consciousness will turn into hubris.

Now the assistant. Usually he is a young man; the novices are equally twenty. He still has little human knowledge; experience in leading subordinates, such as he now has in numbers of eighty at a time, none at all. He knows what his job is: helping to make a profit, as much profit as possible. It depends on that whether he progresses soon. His self-interest drives him forward. Behind his is that of his administrator. Behind that of the Administrator, that of the Principal Administrator, then again that of the Board of Directors and the shareholders of the Company, in an order of increasing force and emphasis. So driven forward the assistant comes to stand against the coolie, the Western assistant against the Eastern coolie. There is a dangerously high chance that the employee’s zeal will spill over into tyranny.

The dynamite cartridge and the fuse lie right next to each other: the smallest spark and there the explosion flares and thunders.

There are enterprises where often, there are others where clashes between workers and leaders are extremely rare. This will largely lie with the administrator. It is not done for him with the prohibition of hitting; that prohibition is one that every clerk gives, yet he knows it will not be strictly followed. The idea of ​​the inferiority of the colored race is too deep in the white man for even the humane-feeling, in whom the impulse to hit would not arise in the face of a white workman, would always control himself in the face of the coolie. The great art is: preventing the risk of collisions. That is, of course, but possible within certain limits in any company; and in a business where the subordinate must act as independently as in the tobacco industry, those boundaries cannot but be relatively narrow. The good example, and what might be called the education of the assistant by the clerk, must do the rest.

Those who believe in the preventive power of punishment demand tougher punishment, and especially a faster one, for coolie crimes. They maintain that a day or so of imprisonment and labor on the revealed road, “pulling blades of grass,” is not a punishment that will deter the coolie from refusing military service or from attacking a European. A proposal has been made to make government unwilling to work labor on a work of public benefit, under the government.

nomen; to have this work done for a living without pay; and from the wage value, after deducting the food costs of the coolie, to make the planter compensate for the damage suffered by the conscription. It is one of the many proposals formulated in response to the Blommestein design, and for which no decision can be expected for the first.

Those who expect more than the punishment of crimes from the removal of those conditions from which crimes arise, insist, above all, on the abolition of the game of dice, which demoralizes the coolies and predestines them to all manner of violence. The government at the time considered such a prohibition,*)but has not proceeded to its issue. It is known that in the Straits the prohibition has had an effect, diametrically opposed to the intended one. All the more dice are played in secret, beyond all control. Even from the regions, where playing is allowed, the gamblers come to the forbidden area to be able to roll particularly high dice. The verdict of the well-known Malay friend and connoisseur of Malay conditions, Frank Swettenham, is that in order to prevent the dice one should put a policeman behind every Native, and a second behind that policeman, in order to review the first, and so on to infinity. What he thus said of Malays can justly be said of Chinese. Where things are so, the attempts, that have been done and are being done by rational clerks to keep the game of dice in vain. A certain supervision exercises the

Chinese ‘tandil’ from, which has the playing lease (under lease of the major Chinese in Medan). This does not prevent dangerous quarrels from occurring among the players or heavy losses. The bitter losers are in a state of restrained anger for the next few days, which can erupt at the slightest cause. Anyone who considers everything carefully will not so much wonder at the occurrence of clashes between European leaders and Eastern workers, as at the relative rarity of such clashes.

Relations between clerks and employees are, as essentially those between employer and employees, likewise subject to many disturbances, and are in themselves burdened with the evil opportunities that any conflict of interests entails. And of course, in the event of a collision, the weaker, the employee, is at a disadvantage. But the same causes which have effected a change for the better in so many other ways have done it here too. The employee of 1911 is in better shape than the employee of 1890. And the increasing expansion of culture, resulting in an increasing need for suitable labor, has for its “background” an increasing improvement in the position of the employees, and an increase in their means of defense against unreasonable demands or arbitrariness.

A complaint not against the administration but against the management of the companies is that the incomes and especially the percentages allocated to employees are out of all proportion much lower than those allocated to the administrators.

The clerks, for their part, consider their high salary to be no more than reasonable remuneration for the responsibility they bear.

Both finally, at least many of both categories, feel as an unlawful restriction of their personal liberty the determination made by the societies that the officials should leave a portion of what is due to them in the profit on interest with their society.

On the other hand, the companies propose that provision as being taken only in the interests of the officials.

The need for foreign workers and the need to attract them by favorable terms; the involvement of the government since ’72; discourses, now and then, on the part of China, the homeland of the majority of the coolies; the urge of public opinion; and, no doubt, their own humanity and sense of justice have also led the planters to a workers’ policy which has made Deli a model industrial region in more ways than one; especially in that of hygiene. What strikes the outsider first, in well-run businesses, is the healthy appearance of the workforce.

This is due to a better wage than either Javanese or Chinese get in their own country; to better housing; to the legal limitation of working time (to a maximum of ten hours); to the provision, in partial payment of wages, of good quality rice, having a market value of pl. m. f 13 (of the year it is f 13.50), for f 9.75; to give fields that the coolies cultivate for their own use; and, above all, for the medical service which the planters have arranged for their people.

The Sumatra’s East Coast section of the Association

for the Promotion of Medical Sciences in the Netherlands Indies has drawn public attention to this with the brochure, which it published in response to the Blommestein design, which, in the opinion of the doctors, threatened this favorable situation. The following statements are largely taken from that brochure. The original situation was: each company treated its own sick. Naturally, this treatment was insufficient. The dispersed forces were united and a medical service was established, which built twenty central hospitals, a central pathological and bacteriological laboratory, and a quarantine station, and appointed a staff of twenty-two European medics and three doctor-djawa. Compared with the rest of the population of the Dutch East Indies, the Delian coolies spend sixty times more on medical aid: almost a million annually (f 900,000) for about 120,000 contract coolies on Deli, against about 5 million for about 35 million inhabitants of Deli. all of the Netherlands Indies. The result is most evident in the figures of the mortality statistics, which, in ten years’ time have fallen from 60 to 1000 to 15 in 1000, figures so far nowhere else on tropical enterprises, while those of many places from five to be ten times higher; and on a comparison with Western European countries only for the most favored class of workers are found figures equal to those of some Delian societies. An incalculable benefit is especially for the Javanese – the Chinese generally arrive here in better physical condition – the medical treatment at Deli. The vast majority – the latest statistic mentions 85 pc. – suffer from my worm disease. Eye diseases, intestinal disorders, and all sorts of lingering ailments resulting from inadequate nutrition and housing are common among them, as are fevers. They are healed of it, with or without approval. That sounds strange; but the Javanese is, also on this point, a big child. He would much rather be sick and remain sick, sort of struggling and fiddling with the medicines of a dukun and all kinds of talismans, incantation forms, and magic tricks, than go to a hospital where he is bound by strict rules and perhaps has to swallow ugly potions. And what Javanese do out of childishness, Chinese do out of wrong thrift. They cannot earn when they are in hospital. At the time, the Deli Spoor was able to build a line through a swampy area where malaria broke out. of the Chinese coolies who had taken up the job, did not get it to move into the dwellings made available to them, located at a distance from the swamp; they lost too much time traveling back and forth: they would rather run the risk of dying of malaria. When the death rate was 50 pc. reached the people. The Deli Spoor started again with its own coolies, which it quartered in a fever-free region, prevented them from working before sunrise and after sunset, and led the prophylactic intake of quinine; this ended the mortality. In quite the same way the Delian planters must act against their Chinese coolies: and they have achieved the same happy result with them. The coolie working under the coolie contract that compels him to do this*), is under and through

Not with the letter of the law; but according to the interpretation that both employers and employees have always given it. Only Javanese work in contract of Dutch Indian coolies.

that compulsion has come into a better condition than the free worker living according to his own imperfect insight ever attains. And this advantage for the individual is at the same time an advantage for the community, because because the patient is nursed in a hospital, that is to say, isolated, the danger of contaminating his environment ceases – a danger that can hardly be overestimated in the large number of infectious diseases. diseases mainly affected by Javanese coolies – dysentery, cholera, hookworm disease, to name but the most common. The prejudice of the workers is gradually disappearing in the face of daily experience. That they appreciate the general situation of the Delian tobacco companies is, moreover, evident from the figures. According to the latest statistic, out of every hundred eighty, there are those who renew it after their contract expires. They do go back to their country, because, having the journey free, they want to visit their family and look after their interests in their native country; but after the settlement they come again. In recent years – after the sad consequences of the decline in the 1890s had disappeared, or had almost disappeared – Deli has acquired such a good name among jobseekers that coolie recruiters in Java can attract work people ‘for the whole world’ with the idea of ​​Deli as the country of destination, when they will indeed be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese: the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton want to visit their family and take care of their interests in their native country; but after the settlement they come again. In recent years – after the sad consequences of the depression in the 1890s had disappeared, or had almost disappeared – Deli has acquired such a good name among jobseekers that coolie recruiters in Java can lure work people ‘for the whole world’ with the idea of ​​Deli as the country of destination, when they will indeed be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton want to visit their family and take care of their interests in their native country; but after the settlement they come again. In recent years – after the sad consequences of the depression in the 1890s had disappeared, or had almost disappeared – Deli has acquired such a good name among jobseekers that coolie recruiters in Java can lure work people ‘for the whole world’ with the idea of ​​Deli as the country of destination, when they will indeed be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton In recent years – after the sad consequences of the decline in the 1890s had disappeared, or had almost disappeared – Deli has acquired such a good name among jobseekers that coolie recruiters in Java can attract work people ‘for the whole world’ with the idea of ​​Deli as the country of destination, when they will indeed be shipped to other regions, where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton In recent years – after the sad consequences of the depression in the 1890s had disappeared, or had almost disappeared – Deli has acquired such a good name among jobseekers that coolie recruiters in Java can lure work people ‘for the whole world’ with the idea of ​​Deli as the country of destination, when they will indeed be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton when indeed they will be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton when indeed they will be shipped to other regions where they would not knowingly go. As for the Chinese, the Chinese government, which in 1909 prohibited emigration from Chinese ports to Banka and Billiton*)release those to Deli. The pursuit of the planters are today to free recruiting as much as possible from the abuses which have rightly discredited it. For the Chinese coolies it has already been achieved, in part, by that system that takes the recruitment out of the hands of the recruiters and puts it in those of the coolies themselves, who repatriate, recruit relatives and acquaintances, with whom they then return to Deli. The same thing will now be tried on Java.

So, roughly speaking, Deli presents herself to the outsider who, as a Westerner, looks at it from a Westerner point of view. How does it seem to the Oriental? How does the coolie feel about the enterprise of European capitalists and planters?

I can not say it. But all over the world the one who works at a disadvantage to the one who owns, he sees things from the other side, so he measures with a different standard. And in a colony the worker is at a disadvantage twice: once as a worker and once as a member of a conquered race, and moreover economically and culturally backward. The coolie’s judgment of Deli must therefore be fundamentally opposite to that of the Deli capitalist or the planter.

The irrefutable proof – if one more might be needed – that for all its advantages, the vast majority of coolies are not satisfied with the situation: the monetary sanction has proved necessary to keep them in work. Here it must do what cruel hunger does in a naturally poorer Europe: force it. It seems a much worse sign that coolies sometimes attack European employees. But it is not. The to given the great number of coolies, blows are very rare. And besides, they do not have the significance that a worker’s assault on an employer would have in Europe. In general, Europeans will be able to conclude from the severity of the retaliation to the severity of the insult. But this is not possible with Easterners, because their character changes the relations (for a Westerner natural) between cause and effect in the psychic.

It is so difficult for us to understand the emotional life of the Oriental, so much do all who have had some association with him know: that certain emotions do not immediately bring him to action, but continue to work for a long time and gradually increase in intensity, finally, sometimes without apparent cause, erupting into an act totally out of proportion to the initial cause. Furthermore, under the influence of communist ideas that still persist in certain forms, he holds the community responsible for the business of whatever its members. And, finally, that in passion he suddenly loses all contemplation, becomes ‘mataglap’, ‘darkened of eyes,’ and literally hits a victim blindly. Who knows that, also knows that it does not have to be a serious misfortune, who is avenged with a bloody vengeance, nor need it be the wronger himself who is affected by the reprisal. While, strangely enough, real harshness very seldom stirs up an uproar against the harsh one.

Much that is now neither known nor understood would become clear to all if anyone wished to undertake the work of separating out the judgments of the Delian court the relative to coolie offenses, and translating it from “the juridical” into Dutch.

At least what is now being done in complete ignorance could then be avoided. That is, of course, no more than part of the whole against which the resistance of the coolies is going. And so the coolie attacks on these or any mandur, tandil, employee, administrator, are less significant than that proved necessity of the monetary sanction, as a sign of the mood of the workers, not against these or some more, but against the whole system. .

After all, the Delian system is the miniature colonial system; and the conditions at Deli on a smaller scale – and except for differences, causes so many coolies to be non-Natives – much the same as those in the whole colony.

The ending system of interests, which brings Native princes and nobles on the side of the ruler over their own countrymen, is repeated in the system, which, with premiums on coolie-recruitment and coolie-labor, tandils and mandoers on the hand of the entrepreneur. brings. Infinitely better than before under his own princes, the native is now living under Dutch rule; and infinitely better than as a ‘free man’ in his own country, Chinese and Javanese have it at Deli under the planter.

Nevertheless, the Netherland Government finally needs troops. And nevertheless the planter needs a special law. Why else, then because, in spite of everything, the Native and the coolie do not have the interest in enforcing the applied systems that the Dutch State and the Deli-Maatschappij have with it, and seeing that they will oppose?

The thought of possible consequences can be felt in Deli’s moral atmosphere.