AVA is still the most beautiful country in all the world, and in the twentieth century is a much more enjoyable place than during the century when I paid it my first visit. The Netherlands officials have greatly relented in their attitude to travelers, and really welcome them. There are guides and guide-books, even an official tourist bureau, and one may be personally conducted or go with his own coupons everywhere. The hotels have been enlarged and modernized, and the automobile has made a driving tour over the beautiful country roads a still more perfect pleasure. The price of the toelatings kart, or admission fee, has recently been doubled, but it does not become an American to grumble at anything Dutch officials or a custom-house may do, after the extraordinary exhibit of American methods at near-by Manila.

The Netherlands India government is doing much to advance the welfare and education of the natives. ​There is a primary school in every village, with normal and technical schools at the large towns, and the missions claim 34,000 Christians as the result of their labors. Five and six thousand Mohammedans annually avail themselves of the privilege of making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and in 1908 experiment was made of assigning trained members of noble Javanese families as officers of native regiments.

The native population has increased by four millions, or one fourth, in the last ten years, and the Chinese population of Netherlands India has doubled, the latter the result of the great development of the tin mines, of the tobacco and petroleum industries the export of petroleum from Sumatra wells having risen from nothing at all to an annual output of 120,000,000 gallons in the decade.

With every wish to avoid errors, one is often misled by accepting as facts the statements of the many kind but inaccurate people who do most of the talking in the world; while just as surely as myths, legends and fairy tales grow with the greatest luxuriance in the tropics, so surely do they gravitate to the stranger's ear. One can only hope to have safely discriminated now and then. E. R. S.

Washington, D. C.,
⁠ February, 1912.