It has been too readily assumed that the ancient system of the Fijians was wholly evil. The disposition of early explorers and missionaries is to describe the races with whom they came in contact as living in a state of savage anarchy, the motive of travellers being to excuse their own rapacity and cruelty; and of missionaries to vindicate their iconoclasm and to magnify their courage and self-sacrifice. "Nothing," says McClennan, "is more common in these old narratives than to find the peoples who were being sacrificed to European cupidity described as living in a purely animal state, without government, laws, or religion, and yet the student will sometimes be able to spell out from these very narratives themselves that the peoples so described were intensely religious, and that they dwelt under the constant pressure of a rigid body of customary law, and what we would call a highly developed system of constitutional government." It was so with the Fijians. In seeing how admirably adapted many of the old superstitions and tabus were for securing sanitation and moral and physical cleanliness, one is led to wonder whether they were survivals of a code brought by their ancestors from the land of their origin; the work of some forgotten law-giver, or merely a gradual evolution from experience coloured by superstition. So admirably were they suited to the haphazard and indolent character of the people who obeyed them, that we can scarcely hope that any European system will take their place until the character itself is regenerated. Let us consider three instances. What could better secure the sanitation of villages than the fear of ndrau-ni-kau, which taught the people to destroy or bury all offal and excreta for fear of affording an instrument for witchcraft to a secret enemy? The villages are no longer swept clean, for Christianity threatens the people with no immediate punishment for being dirty, and they have not yet come to believe that dirt produces the germs of disease. How could the proper nourishment of young children in a country destitute of milk and farinaceous diet be provided for than by the fear that intercourse between the parents during lactation would impoverish the mother's milk and injure the child? In these days the custom of abstinence is decaying, and the mother is again pregnant before her child is fit to assimilate solid food, and she must either continue to nourish the child within her and the child at the breast, to the injury of both, or prematurely wean the latter to the certain injury of its health. How could the sexual morality of the people be better guarded than by shutting up all the unmarried men at nightfall within the mbure-ni-sa, and placing all the girls under the protection of their parents; by training the young men in the emulation of arms and seamanship until they were old enough to marry; by making death the penalty of loss of virtue; by constituting the absence of virginity in a bride a sufficient cause for withholding the dowry, or even by holding up an unchaste bride to the ridicule of the community through the mutilation of the cooked pig presented by the bridegroom's people at the feast given after the marriage? But the mbure-ni-sa was a heathen institution, and boys and girls are now thrown together as they are in civilized communities; there is no more war or other spur to emulation among the young men, who now seek their excitement in sensuality, and the loss of virtue if discovered entails only consequences that can be borne with equanimity, so far at least as the men are concerned. EVILS OF THE TRANSITION STAGE It would be unjust to blame the missionaries for the mutilation of the social system, for by the time they gained a For the transition stage we now have is undoubtedly worse than what it has displaced. The Fijians have been slow to adopt foreign habits, and for more than a generation they have been crawling upon the stumps of their old customs propped by ragged fragments of European innovations. Civilized sentiments have not taken the place once filled by customary law. The Fijian, at all times the creature of circumstance has in the passing of things a pleasant feeling of lack of permanence which affects his whole family life and blunts his sense of responsibility for his children's welfare. The apathy and indolence of the Fijians arise from their climate, their diet and their communal institutions. The climate is too kind to stimulate them to exertion, their food imparts no staying power. The soil gives the means of FOOTNOTES: |