CHAPTER XIV
GIVE US OUR VU GODS AGAIN!
1
Some of the gravest mistakes the white man has made in his efforts to regenerate the Pacific peoples have been indirect rather than direct. This fact is best illustrated by the method Australia and New Zealand resorted to in order to exterminate certain pests. To eliminate the rabbit they introduced the ferret. The ferret then began to reproduce so rapidly that it, too, soon became a pest. So the cat was let loose upon the ferret. Forthwith the cat ran wild and is now one of the most serious problems in Australia.
So has it been in the matter of many of the native races. Commercial greed, which was not satisfied to use what native labor was extant because it is never the manner of natives to be willing serfs to their conquerors, looked everywhere about for people who might be imported under crushing conditions and then cast out. It was that which created the Japanese and Chinese situation in Hawaii; and it is that which has created a similar situation in Fiji.
One would have to be an unadulterated sentimentalist to contend that the passing of the natives is not justified by the present development of the Antipodes. None of the native elements—the Australoids or the Tasmanians or the Maories—would, of their own accord, even with years of Caucasian example and precedent, have made of these dominions the healthful, productive lands they now are. As long as the problem remains one of the ascendancy of the fittest over the fit, it is simple, and the present solution justifiable. But the introduction of other races who have only their servility to recommend them is a poor practice and soon turns into a more serious problem still. In most cases, a little patience and foresight would have obviated such contingencies. Had the white folk who tried to exploit Hawaii contented themselves with a slower development, the Hawaiians would to-day be as secure as are the Samoans and the Maories. In all cases such as these and that of the Philippines, the native, when given a chance, soon justifies his existence and our faith in him.
In Fiji we have an example of the introduction of the Hindu to the extinction of the Fijian for the sake of the enrichment of the white man. The indentured Indian, small and wiry, who seems too delicate for any task and is stopped by none, acts as a reinforcement in the South Sea labor market. He glides along in purposeful indifference. As coolie, he may be seen at any time wending his way along Victoria Parade, bareheaded, a thin sulu of colored gauze wound about his loins. As freed man, he is the tailor, the jeweler, the grocer, and the gardener. As proprietor he is buying up the lands and becoming plantation-owner. Then he bewails the woes of his native land, India, far off in the distance. Here in Fiji, where the coolie has a chance to start life anew, the longing for rebirth in this world, still fresh, bursts into being. But no sooner does it see the sunlight than it turns to crush the Fijian, in whose lands the Hindu is as much of an invader as ever Briton was in India.
The introduction of the Indian into Fiji was not accomplished without considerable protest from small planters, who saw in it and the taxation scheme introduced over thirty years ago, great danger to the Fijian laborer. Aside from the burdens imposed upon the people by a law which compelled them to work for their chiefs without wages, for the same length of time that they worked for some plantation-owner with wages, there was the equally bad law being "experimented" with which compelled the people to pay in kind instead of in money. So serious had the situation become that the "Saturday Review" of June 19, 1886, declared: "As the Natives must eat something to live, it is perhaps not unnatural that many people who know Fiji entertain distinct fears that the combination of over-taxation and want of food will drive the Fijians to return to cannibalism." The charge of cannibalism was denied by the Rev. Mr. Calvert, though further evidence is not at hand, as I have seen only the Government's side of the case.
