inheritance of the two peoples are intimately related and probably identical in origin. Similar climatic conditions prevail throughout the Philippine and the East Indian archipelagoes. Therefore the Philippines and Java, and a typical West Indian island like Cuba, present the problem of tropical labor in three equations, so to speak, each with the unknown quantities in different but comparable relations, and consequently a study of labor conditions in any one of these countries throws light upon corresponding conditions in either of the others. Especially is a study of Javanese workers valuable as showing us a number of conditions as general among the Malay peoples under all forms of government, that we might otherwise wrongly attribute to accidental and easily remediable political or economic causes.

Java has an area of about 49,000 square miles, and is 5,000 square miles larger than Cuba and 8,000 square miles larger than Luzon. The population is, in round numbers, 29,000,000, or several times the total of the whole Philippine group, and fully sixteen times that of Cuba. Only about 63,000 of the inhabitants are classed as Europeans, and this includes a considerable number of persons who rank politically rather than racially with the whites. The long and slender outline of the island, running parallel with the equator, is, as in the case of Cuba, due to the presence of a more or less continuous mountain axis, whose prolongation in either direction is marked by adjacent land bodies. Sumatra to the west and the islands continuing to Timor on the east are the remaining links of this otherwise submerged ocean highland. A comparatively slight change of sea level would make of Java two islands of nearly equal extent, composed, respectively, of the Preanger and the Tosari plateaus, which now dominate the western and the eastern ends of Java, affording with their bracing air and temperate climate a welcome refuge for the white residents during the hot season.

The central plains between these two mountain regions were the seat of the lost and forgotten Hindoo civilization which flourished in the island ten or twelve centuries ago, and which has left no trace of its existence except massive Buddhist and Brahman ruins, whose origin the degenerate descendants of the builders ascribe to the gods themselves. Later the same district was the home of a Mohammedan empire, whose more or less disputed boundaries extended to Borneo and beyond, but which became a vassal state of the Dutch East Indies Company and now is divided into two equally impotent sultanates of limited extent. These remain as convenient administrative divisions, distinguished from ordinary residencies by a numerous and ceremonious court, more involved governmental procedure, and certain remnants of official privilege and property rights retained by the native rulers that affect private law and especially the conditions of land tenure. The mountain districts, on the other hand, were not organized into powerful states prior to the Dutch occupation, and therefore have been

assimilated more completely into the uniform administrative system which the Netherlands Government is gradually extending to all its possessions in the Indies.

Racially the native inhabitants of Java are divided into three main branches, all of whom are allied and profess the Mohammedan religion, but whose features, language, and customs differ in a marked degree. The Preanger highland is inhabited by the Soudanese, who are lighter colored, as a rule, than the coast dwellers-a people given to the cultivation of rice and the smaller food crops upon peasant holdings, or employed on tea and cinchona plantations. Coffee, which was formerly the staple crop of this district, has of recent years suffered from blight to such an extent that it is rapidly disappearing from cultivation in many places. The Soudanese are said to work best at occupations not involving the exertion of great physical strength, such as coffee and tea picking; but this direction of aptitude is probably the result of training rather than of racial peculiarities, as the home of this people is not in a country where cane raising and other severer forms of tropical labor have been profitable. Central Java is occupied by the Javanese proper, a darker, stockier, and more hard working race, trained to habits of plodding, if rather inefficient, industry by generations of subservient obedience to despotic rulers. These people were the subjects of the ancient Hindoo kings and their Mohammedan conquerors, and they live in the most densely populated portion of the island. They are employed in the cultivation of rice, tobacco, and sugar, and are recruited by cooly agents for work in other islands of the Netherlands Indies, and even for northern Borneo, the Straits Settlements, and the French colonies of New Caledonia. In the eastern end of Java, around the chief commercial center of Surabaya and upon the adjacent island of Madura, the Madurese are settled, a race of more typical Malay habits and aptitudes than the natives previously mentioned. They have something of the mechanical handiness that characterizes this sailor people, and furnish the best mechanics that Java affords. However, this superior skill may be accounted for in part by the fact that for over a century Surabaya has been the chief naval depot of the Dutch Indies, and that a population of several thousand natives has been almost constantly employed by the government at ship and boat building and other mechanical trades for several generations, while private employers have naturally settled near this source of labor supply. Surabaya is the headquarters through which sugar machinery is supplied to most of the Javanese plantations and where repairs are usually effected. Accustomed from youth to the stricter industrial administration of the workshops, the Madurese are said to be the steadiest workers among the natives. They appear to have a keener sense of the value of money, probably for the same reason,

and possess some rudiments of thrift. But they do not engage with equal willingness in the more arduous forms of field labor, and when left alone with nature are said to take to sea pursuits and stock raising rather than to the cultivation of the soil.

In the mountains and in some of the remoter coast districts there are communities which appear to be quite distinct from the three main divisions of the native population of Java just described, and some of the port cities, like Batavia, have a mongrel population quite beyond the possibility of classification, but composed largely of imported elements. The great source of labor supply, however, is from the three branches of the people just mentioned. Practically there is no immigrant labor. Europeans are employed in supervising capacities, and some discharged soldiers and half-castes follow mechanical trades in the larger cities. The Chinese, who are fairly numerous in the towns, engage to some extent in petty manufacturing, but are chiefly employed in mercantile pursuits. They do practically no unskilled manual labor and very little arduous work of any kind. Essentially they are a race of traders everywhere in the Tropics, except when working under cooly contracts. They number about 280,000 in Java, or rather less than 1 per cent of the whole population. There are also some 18,000 Arabians and 3,000 other Orientals in the island, who are likewise almost entirely engaged in trade.

Cuba, with a population hardly exceeding 1,500,000, exports nearly $15,000,000 more per annum than Java, with equal natural resources and 29,000,000 people. On the other hand, Java consumes but $40,000,000 worth of imported commodities, including machinery and textiles. Deducting the value of the articles imported for the 63,000 Europeans, the average native hardly consumes foreign goods to the value of a dollar a year. This indicates the degree to which his energies are devoted to the production of those things which he personally consumes. The food that he imports is a negligible quantity. While the per capita value of exports from the Philippines ranges from $3 to $4.50, that from Java varies from $2 to $2.25. But if we were to deduct the value of food imports in each instance from the value of native commodities exported, we should find the difference in net export values thus resulting very slight, though apparently the Filipino must be credited with a somewhat larger production than the Javanese, as is to be expected from the sparser population and relatively more abundant natural resources of the archipelago. However, the Filipino consumes more imported goods than the Javanese, and in this sense his standard of living is higher. So, while exports exceed imports in Java in all normal years and are not infrequently 50 per cent higher than the latter, the balance of trade has been upon the other side of the ledger in the Philippines.

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The natural resources of Java are largely agricultural. Undeveloped coal measures of as yet undetermined importance exist, and the relation of the island to the Borneo-Sumatra oil fields suggests the possibility that petroleum deposits may be discovered. Tin figures in the Java-Madura exports, but the mines are on the island of Banca, north of Sumatra. About $1,000,000 worth of timber, including dye woods, leaves the country annually. Among the exports sugar is easily first, however, the amount shipped from the island approaching 1,000,000 short tons per annum, with a value of $28,000,000. Tobacco follows, with a product worth well over $8,000,000, and the coffee sent abroad is valued at about $1,000,000 less than that amount. Copra, tea, and clean rice are the next important items, with which must be included the product of the recently established quinine industry, which returns the island nearly $2,000,000 per annum.

The geographical distribution of some of the leading crops, especially of coffee, is changing. Formerly the Preanger highland was the chief center of this industry, but the damp climate of west Java having proved favorable to the spread of blights recently introduced into the island, there is at present a tendency to concentrate the plantations in the drier eastern plateaus. Meantime tea is usurping the place formerly occupied by coffee in the western part of Java. Copra is of course confined largely to the coast country, and sugar is cultivated on the great plains of central and eastern Java, not a single factory of importance being situated in the country tributary to Batavia. Tobacco also is chiefly raised in the flat country, though there are some plantations in the uplands. Rice is an almost universal crop, which is cultivated wherever water for irrigation is present. The cinchona forests are in part government undertakings, and are found only in those high altitudes that resemble their original Andean habitat.

Most of the commerce of Java is carried on from the north coast and is shared by three principal cities. Batavia, which is farthest to the west, is the seat of government, though the residence of the governor-general of the Indies is at Buitenzorg, a small town situated two hours' railway journey from the coast in the Preanger highland. This city receives produce from nearly all the Preanger district and the coast country for 100 miles in either direction. Samarang, near the center of the north coast, is supported by the large areas of fertile sugar land and densely settled rice country in its vicinity and by the remoter tobacco and sugar plantations of the old sultanates of central Java. The most eastern of the three ports, Surabaya, while in some respects the least agreeable for residence, has the largest population and carries on the most extensive commerce of any city in the island, besides being a manufacturing center of local importance. Connecting these three cities is a trunk line of railway over 400 miles long,

while branch lines and a very extensive system of steam trams, operating for several hundred miles through central and eastern Java, render nearly every part of the island accessible for freight and

passengers.

Although Java is a densely settled country, netted with railways and macadamized highways, and oftentimes presenting the aspect of a highly cultivated garden to the traveler, its forests and remoter districts still harbor wild elephants and tigers, the rhinoceros and the bantong, or forest buffalo, while pythons of incredible size at times. wind along the hedges and through the rank herbage of the rice dikes almost to the streets of Batavia. Men by millions only half triumph. over the wonderful fecundity of tropical nature, and the moment the restraining hand of the cultivator relaxes its vigilance the jungle and its thousands of denizens resume possession of their former home. Nowhere in the West Indies, or even in the Philippines, is this struggle of man with nature so unremitting, and in few places in the world is its successful issue rewarded with more pleasing results.

HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT.

Java illustrates what can be accomplished by the consistent application of a single theory of colonial government to a country with a docile population and sufficient natural resources. It is sometimes cited as the most prominent example of successful colonial administration in the Orient and used to prove the validity of the theory which has guided its rulers. But the Orient has no single example of unqualified success in colonial administration, and if such could be discovered, it would probably disprove in one application every theory that it confirmed in another. Sumatra is a larger island and in many ways more richly and variously endowed by nature than Java, and it has been under Dutch sovereignty during the whole period of Javanese development, but lacking a population disciplined to obedience by generations of serfdom under native despots, it has remained in large part undeveloped and is yet the seat of a warfare that has been carried on almost continuously for over 40 years between the Netherlands Government and the native tribes. Holland has been successful in Java not alone on account of its colonial policy, but also on account of the character of the people and of the country with which it has had to deal.

This policy is no man's invention, but has been gradually evolved out of the necessities of early colonial conditions. Indeed few persons of the present generation would hasten to claim the credit of its discovery, for originally it was in essence the economic exploitation of the people through the machinery of native administration. Within less than half a century the progress of public opinion and altruistic