colonial corruption in Java; Dekker was one of the first subscribers to Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië. Another acquaintance was W. Bosch, chief of the public health services in the colony, who had written critically on the effects of the colonial system on the health of the population, arguing to his superiors that they should help combat poverty, malnourishment, and communicable diseases. Bosch had provided logistical assistance during the events of May 1848, and they remained friends even after van Hoëvell returned to the Netherlands. Return to the Netherlands: political career While Rochussen had been glad to see him go, back in the Netherlands van Hoëvell fared better politically. He was vindicated when the government canceled the acceptance of his forced resignation, and he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the events of May 1848. The publication of the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië, which had stopped at his expulsion from Batavia, was resumed in 1849, now in a less repressive environment. For some pamphlets, he used the pseudonym Jeronymus. In September 1849, he was elected to the House of Representatives of the Netherlands for the Liberal party and he remained a member of parliament until 1862. He was one of only a handful of Dutch parliamentarians who had actually been to the East Indies, and often spoke eloquently on colonial matters in parliament. He became "one of the most ferocious critics" of the Cultivation System, the government-run system (already criticized by W. Bosch and others) that demanded that the local peasantry set aside a significant portion of their land to grow crops for the Dutch to export. Van Hoëvell was a proponent of private ownership, and argued that the system, besides being immoral, was also economically ineffective. His criticism of Dutch colonial practices extended to the Dutch West India Company; he was a supporter of abolitionism at a time when Dutch colonists owned tens of thousands of slaves, mainly on plantations in Surinam. In parliament, he continued what had become his mission: to educate the Dutch citizenry on the nature of Dutch colonialism. In his speeches, he occasionally used confidential government information sent to him from the Indies by his friend Bosch. With great expertise and sometimes "disturbing eloquence" he criticized the Dutch government for generating millions from the colonies while denying the locals "education, Christianity, and the blessings of progress". In 1860, he was one of those politicians who forced Prime Minister