The Tongans were great nationalists with a mortal dread of being taken over by one of the Powers. They were even afraid of England, although they seemed quite safe in that direction. The British protectorate over the kingdom was (and is) a very light one. Great Britain was selecting Chief Justices and Auditors for them, and quite naturally the Tongans paid the salaries. The British Consul and Agent acted as adviser to the Queen, and it was his duty to approve any financial expenditures. With these restrictions, Tonga is today a free constitutional monarchy, with a parliament and the Queen’s privy council.
The point of friction has always been the British Consul’s right to veto expenditures. If he was well trained in the British civil service the plan worked out well. But the job occupies not more than an hour of the Consul’s day, and too many of them have used the leisure to indulge in petty statesmanship and tyrannies far beyond their official authority.
The financial veto is a powerful weapon, but the check in expenditure has been Tonga’s salvation. It is hard for Western civilization to understand the Polynesian’s utter lack of money sense—or the Melanesian’s, for that matter. From early childhood the European has learned the art of getting and spending. Not so the Pacific Islander. Although in many ways they may excel us intellectually, it is next to impossible to make them understand that coined metal isn’t something you pick off trees and throw around for the moment’s enjoyment. It’s all great fun, while the party lasts. Only by hard knocks will the native learn money economy. Oftentimes his education comes in jail, where he can study at leisure the disadvantages of Western methods over his old-time communal system.
Wild extravagances of Church and State forced Great Britain to set up a protectorate to prevent Tonga from falling into other hands. The British Consul, with keys to the treasury, had to span the great void which is the Tongan money sense. Today I know of no other nation so financially sound as Tonga—no debt, internal or external, and a surplus of £150,000, about twenty-five dollars per head. For the United States this would be a capital of well over three billions, with no debts at all. Not so bad for Tonga, a land that saw iron for the first time about 250 years ago. And the kingdom’s wealth is well distributed, too. Every Tongan male at the age of eighteen receives from his government eight-and-a-half acres of fertile land and a town lot to build his home on.
The white man goes through these islands and sees many things that may be comic from his biased viewpoint. But shouldn’t we turn the laugh on ourselves in the light of New Deals and Planned Economies? While Western civilization is eating its accumulated fat and beginning to gnaw its own vitals, I wonder if some Tongan Brain Trust might not lead us out of our wilderness of bureaucratic taxes, and teach us what the Abundant Life really means.
In 1924 Queen Salote was in her young twenties, but her mind was matured by experience in government, and she was quick to see the help our Foundation could give her little realm of 25,000 souls. We were working like devils to give Tonga an adequate water supply, and I wore my diplomacy threadbare trying to convince the Scottish C.M.O. of the obvious need. Although I am a chronic admirer of the Scots—and haven’t I seen them survive and carry on in posts that would have demolished a less sturdy breed?—this Medical Officer remained a prickly thistle that drove me to distraction. I’m a peaceable man, as the Irish say. Certainly I’ve managed somehow to get along with a great variety of human types.
But not with this one. The few faint hairs that remained on my head bristled at the sight of him. He bothered those hairs worse than the Tongan flies that swarmed around breakfast at Bill Smith’s boarding house; there I learned to cover my bald spot with a knotted handkerchief. No handkerchief could shield me from the Scot’s irritating perversity. I had to confer with him, of course, or I couldn’t have worked at all. He was a very competent surgeon, particularly skillful in eye surgery—a rare accomplishment in the South Pacific. As a health officer he had done some splendid work, especially with yaws. But I had got off on the wrong foot when I disagreed with him about pig hookworm. His great fault—if it be a fault—was his firm conviction that he was a final authority on everything.
One of his assistants, a brilliant young fellow who suffered as long as he could endure it, then accepted a high post in Australia, gave me all the help he dared, and that was useful. But the Scot had an anti-Lambert complex. We were trying to install model latrines all over the Tongan Islands, and we had to choose a type that met with his approval. Nothing I offered was satisfactory, and it was impossible to find out what he wanted. If I hadn’t finally resorted to a “Tongafiti” trick I feel sure that nothing would have been accomplished. At last, in complete despair, I went to him with one of the plans he had rejected and said suavely, “Well, Doctor, I’ve finally come around to your original idea, and I’ll go with you on this plan.” Without a murmur he accepted it. I had discovered a system.
Probably Tonga was fortunate in having so good a man at the helm. For the kingdom had been hospitable to some quacks, both clerical and medical.
A prominent trader was saying good-by to friends at the boat and remarking, “Glad you’re going while you have so good an impression of the women,” when a well-dressed stranger with a lady on his arm strolled up and said, “No man is good enough for a good woman.” This knightly champion’s name doesn’t matter, except that it went on the Tongan medical register with the string of initials “M.D., Phy. D.O., M.S.R.U.I., S.A. and Harvard University D.O.” The S.A. might have meant something, but his fantastic list of degrees remained as much a mystery as why the Tongan Government appointed him to a high medical post. Later on he admitted to me that he learned all his medicine as a hospital wardsman.