PERSONAL LALA IS RENT
It was not until 1890 that the government found leisure to attack the native boundaries, and then the truth came out. By that time the natives had come to regard land from a new point of view. The principal commodity of old Fiji was
food. Land had no value except in so far as it produced food, and, therefore, the mere possession of it was not coveted unless there were inferiors living on it as cultivators. But as soon as it was realized that land, when leased to Europeans, produced money, the earth-hunger of the chiefs increased a thousandfold. They now laid claims to lands which, twenty years before, they would not have accepted as a gift, and tried to prove their case by quoting instances in which the resident cultivators had done them lala service. The rival claimants would as eagerly assert that the services in question were given in token of gratitude for protection, or out of mere neighbourly feeling in times of scarcity—for anything, in short, but rent, and would allege delicate shades of distinction in the ritual employed. But all alike admitted that a chief's interest in land would be established if he could prove an ancient right to order gardens to be planted by subject tribes, or to demand services from them in house-building, fishing or contributions for the entertainment of visitors. In few cases did the chiefs claim an absolute proprietorship in the soil; they admitted that the land was vested in the people living upon it, subject to the usual tribute.
Personal lala, then, was a landed interest. The chiefs of the large confederations had acquired it partly by appropriating the common lands of the tribe, and partly by the conquest or protection of the weaker tribes that made up their confederations. And if this seems to be but a slender title to so enormous a privilege, let it be remembered that the large landed proprietors in Europe have come by their property in no more regular or legitimate a fashion. Until the establishment of the Copyhold Commission some of the landed interests in England were quite as divergent from modern ideas as lala. Yet, among those who advocate that property in land should be transferred from the landlord to the State, there are few who propose to make the change except upon the basis of fair compensation to the landlords. It is a recognized principle of modern legislation that whenever a class has acquired certain rights by prescription, no measure injuriously affecting such rights shall be enacted without fair
compensation. Policy as well as justice made it incumbent upon the British Government to confirm in their ancient rights the chiefs who had voluntarily ceded their country.
But the attempt to reduce these rights to written law was most unfortunate. Chiefs who were landlords were, at a stroke of the pen, given the right to exact personal lala from tribes who were not their tenants; and throughout quite half the group, the right to personal lala was conferred upon chiefs who were not landlords at all, and had no claim to it whatever. Confusion became worse confounded when the hereditary chiefs were expelled from office for misconduct, and persons of inferior rank were appointed to succeed not only to their official duties, but to their private rights to personal lala. Had the question been understood it would have been easy to frame a regulation of limiting the exercise of personal lala to those chiefs entitled to it by ancient usage, allowing each disputed case to be decided on its merits, and to limit the holders of government offices of Roko Tui and Mbuli to lala for communal purposes. It says much for the tenacity of customary law that the chiefs took so little advantage of the ignorance of the government—an ignorance that may be compared with the mistakes made by the Indian government in the matter of the Ryots. The chiefs of the miniature republics of western Fiji have never attempted to claim personal lala, and even chiefs, such as Roko Tui Ra, who were brought from other provinces by the government to be Roko Tui over people who had never been federated under a paramount chief, have used their powers very sparingly, although they were placed in the false position of having to maintain large establishments on very insufficient salaries.
LALA RECEIVES LEGAL SANCTION
The Colonial government has been bitterly attacked by certain European critics for permitting lala to exist at all. Insufficient knowledge of the subject has betrayed them into expressions as inaccurate as they are intemperate. "Slavery," and "Legalized Robbery," are not the strongest terms that have been applied to lala, and the people have been described as sunk in apathy and despair under the exactions of their
chiefs. Let us see how far these charges are borne out by facts. The native regulations that defined the lala also provided that—"If any town shall desire to commute its lala work due to any chief for a fixed annual payment in money or in kind, and such chief shall have accepted such commutation with the Governor's sanction, the right of lala cannot again be resumed by him. A record of all such commutations shall be kept in the Native Affairs Office." Although many native communities now receive large incomes from rents and surplus taxes, from which commutation could be paid, there has been no single instance of an application to commute the lala during the thirty-one years in which the Regulation has been in force. If the people felt the lala to be oppressive they would not have hesitated to tender the trifling annual payment that would free them from it. There is no doubt that the lala has been pushed beyond its legitimate uses, but always by the chiefs of the confederations. Personal lala cannot be legitimately applied without the reciprocal obligation of providing the workers with food (vakaotho), and when the chief neglects this obligation, or uses the lala in the execution of work for Europeans, the lala at once becomes, not legalized robbery, for it is illegal, but oppression. An instance of this occurred before annexation, when, as already related, the American Government had fined king Thakombau £9000 for the destruction of Vice-Consul Williams's house in a fire that was probably accidental. The people of the Tailevu coast were ordered to fish bêche-de-mer for sale to Europeans in order to meet the American claim, but they refused, though they knew that refusal might cost them their lives. For Thakombau they would cheerfully have stripped themselves of all they had, but to collect produce destined for a foreigner was an infringement of the law of custom.
The instances of oppressive lala nearly all came from one province—that of Thakaundrove—governed by a young chief who, having been educated in Sydney, wished to live in European style beyond his means. For abuse of the lala, especially in levying goods for sale to Europeans, he was