Their education costs him little or nothing; scarcely any clothing is required, his hut needs very little enlargement, and no beds are used. Many of them die in infancy from the small-pox and other distempers, but never from scanty food or criminal neglect of parents. The women of all classes suckle their children, till we ascend to the wives of the regents and of the sovereign, who employ nurses.
Though women soon arrive at maturity, and enter early into the married state, they continue to bear children to an advanced age, and it is no uncommon thing to see a grandmother still making addition to her family. Great families are however rare. Though there are some women who have borne thirteen or fourteen children, the average is rather low than otherwise. A _chácha_, or family, is generally less numerous than in Europe, both from the circumstance that the young men and women more early leave the houses of their parents to form establishments for themselves, and from an injudicious mode of labouring among women of the lower ranks. Miscarriages among the latter are frequently caused by over-straining themselves in carrying excessive burdens, and performing oppressive field-work, during pregnancy. The average number of persons in a family does not exceed four, or four and a half. As the labour of the women is almost equally productive with that of the men, female children become as much objects of solicitude with their parents as male: they are nursed with the same care, and viewed with the same pride and tenderness. In no class of society are children of either sex considered as an incumbrance, or the addition to a family as a misfortune; marriage is therefore almost universal. An unmarried man past twenty is seldom to be met with, and an old maid is considered a curiosity. Neither custom, law, or religion, enjoins celibacy on the priesthood, or any other order of the community, and by none of them is it practised. Although no strictness of principle, nor strong sense of moral restraint, prevails in the intercourse of the sexes, prostitution is not common, except in the capitals.
As the Javans are a quiet domestic people, little given to adventure, disinclined to foreign enterprise, not easily roused to violence or bloodshed, and little disposed to irregularities of any kind, there are but few families left destitute in consequence of hazards incurred or crimes committed by their natural protectors. The character of blood-thirsty revenge, which has been attributed to all the inhabitants of the Indian Archipelago, by no means applies to the people of Java; and though, in all cases where justice is badly administered or absolutely perverted, people may be expected to enforce their rights or redress their grievances, rather by their own passions than by an appeal to the magistrate, comparatively few lives are lost on the island by personal affrays or private feuds.