poverty, crop failure, famine, and epidemics in 1900. Lawyers and politicians supportive of Brooshooft's campaigning had an audience with Queen Wilhelmina and argued that the Netherlands owed the peoples of the Indies a 'debt of honour'.

In 1901, the Queen, under the advice of her prime minister of the Christian Anti-Revolutionary Party, Abraham Kuyper, formally declared a benevolent "Ethical Policy", which