Goeman Borgesius — Hendrikus Goeman Borgesius (1844-1917) — was a Dutch liberal member of the Tweede Kamer whose principal contribution to the Atjeh-era parliamentary record is the common-sense liberal statement that the entire Dutch distinction between gewone (ordinary) and buitengewone (extraordinary) expenditure was ijdel gepraat — idle talk. The proposition dissolved, by argumentative elimination, the budgetary defence of the Atjeh-oorlog.
The 1905 budget debate
In the Vermeulen-period debate on whether extraordinary expenditure — railways, irrigation works, school-building, the Atjeh-oorlog — should be financed by borrowing, Goeman Borgesius (lib.) observed that “al het geredeneer over gewone en buitengewone uitgaven en inkomsten ijdel gepraat” was — all the reasoning about ordinary and extraordinary expenditure and income was idle talk. It was, he said, “een vreemde scholastiek, die sommige ministers en kamerleden bedreven om te betogen, dat de kosten van de Atjeh-oorlog v.v. niet gedragen werden door Java maar door het Banka-tin of door de inkomstenbelasting voor Europeanen” — a strange scholasticism that some ministers and chambermembers practised to argue that the costs of the Atjeh-oorlog etc. were not borne by Java but by the Banka tin or by the income-tax on Europeans.
The liberal alternative
The “zienswijze van Borgesius” — the view of Borgesius — was that all expenditure together should be met from all income together, and that, when the total available sum was smaller or larger than initially expected, all expenditure would be proportionally reduced or could be increased. Vermeulen observes that this view “een eind had kunnen maken aan de uitvoerige discussie, wat precies uit de ƒ 40 millioen, die Nederland in 1905 aan Indië zou schenken, kon worden gefinancierd” — could have put an end to the lengthy discussion of what precisely could be financed out of the ƒ 40 million that the Netherlands was to grant to the Indies in 1905: education, road-building, defence — it made no difference.
Significance
Goeman Borgesius’s intervention is the procedural-liberal counter to the scholastic budgetary defence of the Atjeh war. The Borgesius principle — all expenditure together from all income together — supplied the commonsense platform on which the subsequent ethical-policy budgets of the Idenburg-Cremer-Pleyte period were built.
The 1905 budget debate
In the Vermeulen-period debate on whether extraordinary expenditure — railways, irrigation works, school-building, the Atjeh-oorlog — should be financed by borrowing, Goeman Borgesius (lib.) observed that “al het geredeneer over gewone en buitengewone uitgaven en inkomsten ijdel gepraat” — all the reasoning about ordinary and extraordinary expenditure and income was idle talk was — all the reasoning about ordinary and extraordinary expenditure and income was idle talk. It was, he said, “een vreemde scholastiek, die sommige ministers en kamerleden bedreven om te betogen, dat de kosten van de Atjeh-oorlog v.v. niet gedragen werden door Java maar door het Banka-tin of door de inkomstenbelasting voor Europeanen” — a strange scholasticism that some ministers and chambermembers practised to argue that the costs of the Atjeh-oorlog etc. were not borne by Java but by the Banka tin or by the income-tax on Europeans.
Account from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (1897)
Goeman Borgesius appears twice in the record of the Atjeh debate of 16–17 November 1897, in both cases in connection with the question of Dutch cruelties in Atjeh.
H. van Kol named him on 17 November among those who had previously uttered grave accusations on the subject, complaining that ministers sought to dispose of such charges — “ook door de heeren Des Amorie van der Hoeven en Goeman Borgesius vroeger uitgesproken” — with the answers “die berichten zullen wel overdreven zijn” or “daarvan is mij niets bekend,” while the whole of the Indies had knowledge of them.
Later in the same sitting the Minister of Colonies Cremer quoted the words with which the Minister Bergsma had closed an extensive argument on 22 September 1896 “in antwoord op eene vraag van den heer Goeman Borgesius” — that the exchanged telegrams showed sufficiently that the Netherlands and Indies governments were both most strongly opposed to mutileeren, that if the isolated case had occurred it was not wholly inexplicable in an army composed of different elements, that it would certainly not happen again, and that the Governor-General had forbidden it in the strictest terms. Cremer declared that the government of the day fully subscribed to what had then been said.
Goeman Borgesius’s question of 22 September 1896 is thus the parliamentary precedent to which both the critics and the defenders of the government appealed in the 1897 debate on the atrocities.
See Also
- Atjeh-oorlog (1873-1904)
- Batig Slot
- Ereschuld
- Ethische Politiek
- Rutgers van Rozenburg
- Bool (liberal MP)
- A. W. F. Idenburg
- J. T. Cremer
- Th. B. Pleyte
- 1905
Sources
Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis van Nederland van 1849 tot 1901, by Mr W. J. van Welderen baron Rengers, 4th rev. ed., Vol. IV: Oost-Indië 1891-1918 by Dr W. H. Vermeulen (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), pp. 291-292.
Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898, uitgave van de Sociaaldemokratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br P95-178, pp. 63, 79–80.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.