sentences:  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.