If one would see the Amsterdam merchant as the satirist sees him, the locus classicus is Multatuli’s famous novel Max Havelaar, where he stands delightfully nude in the person of Mr. Drystubble, head of the firm of Last and Co., Coffee-brokers, No. 37 Laurier Canal. Max Havelaar was published in the early sixties to draw attention to certain scandals in Dutch colonial administration, and it has lived on, and will live, by reason of a curious blend of vivacity and intensity.  Here is a little piece of Mr. Drystubble’s mind:—­

Business is slack on the Coffee Exchange.  The Spring Auction will make it right again.  Don’t suppose, however, that we have nothing to do.  At Busselinck and Waterman’s trade is slacker still.  It is a strange world this:  one gets a deal of experience by frequenting the Exchange for twenty years.  Only fancy that they have tried—­I mean Busselinck and Waterman—­to do me out of the custom of Ludwig Stern.  As I do not know whether you are familiar with the Exchange, I will tell you that Stern is an eminent coffee-merchant in Hamburg, who always employed Last and Co.  Quite accidentally I found that out—­I mean that bungling business of Busselinck and Waterman.  They had offered to reduce the brokerage by one-fourth per cent.  They are low fellows—­nothing else.  And now look what I have done to stop them.  Any one in my place would perhaps have written to Ludwig Stern, “that we too would diminish the brokerage, and that we hoped for consideration on account of the long services of Last and Co.”

I have calculated that our firm, during the last fifty years, has gained four hundred thousand guilders by Stern.  Our connexion dates from the beginning of the continental system, when we smuggled Colonial produce and such like things from Heligoland.  No, I won’t reduce the brokerage.

I went to the Polen coffee-house, ordered pen and paper, and wrote:—­

“That because of the many honoured commissions received from North Germany, our business transactions had been extended”—­(it is the simple truth)—­“and that this necessitated an augmentation of our staff”—­(it is the truth:  no more than yesterday evening our bookkeeper was in the office after eleven o’clock to look for his spectacles);—­“that, above all things, we were in want of respectable, educated young men to conduct the German correspondence.  That, certainly, there were many young Germans in Amsterdam, who possessed the requisite qualifications, but that a respectable firm”—­(it is the very truth),—­“seeing the frivolity and immorality of young men, and the daily increasing number of adventurers, and with an eye to the necessity of making correctness of conduct go hand in hand with correctness in the execution of orders”—­(it is the truth, I observe, and nothing but the truth),—­“that such a firm—­I mean Last and Co., coffee-brokers, 37 Laurier Canal—­could not be anxious enough in engaging new hands.”