C. van Nispen van Sevenaar was a member of the States General who took part in the secret sessions of the Tweede Kamer of April 1874 on the origin of the Atjeh war. Verstege (1886, pp. 32 and 120-121) quotes two of his judgments. On 17 April 1874 he reminded the meeting that the Minister (Fransen van de Putte) had, one day earlier or one day later, exulted that he had been able to reduce the formation of the Indies army by a thousand men, and answered the plea that the neglect of the means of defence was not to be laid on this Minister: “Men had zich door vroeger plichtverzuim zelf buiten staat gesteld dien oorlog te voeren… Men was niet in staat oorlog te voeren en toch deed men het. Men had geen de minste notie van den vijand, dien men bestrijden ging; toch maakte men oorlog” (“By earlier neglect of duty the government had itself put itself out of condition to wage this war… It was not able to wage war and yet it did so. It had not the least notion of the enemy it was going to combat; yet it made war”), closing with the question what would have happened if a great revolt had broken out in the Indies, “In casu wist men drie jaren vooruit, dat er oorlog zou ontstaan” (“In this case the war was known to be coming three years in advance”). It was also Van Nispen van Sevenaar who, in the same secret session, formulated the true meaning of the annexation of Groot-Atjeh: that the Dutch were resolved “to hold what they had once taken from Atjeh”, and that the wish and purpose was indeed “extension of authority” — the reading that Verstege opposed to all later sophisticated interpretations of that act.
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Source
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 32, 120-121. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.