A HISTORY OF FIJI 33 



them as individuals; but the fault lies chiefly with the home boards, 

 who, not realizing the paramount importance of local conditions in 

 treating with primitive peoples, have attempted to enforce almost the 

 same set of regulations from Greenland's icy mountains to Africa's 

 coral strand. 



The missionary, whether he would or no, is forbidden to conduct 

 marriages between heathen and Christians, and too often one party to 

 the contract must enter upon it with a lie upon his or her lips. The 

 hypocrisy and espionage which results from sharing with the informer, 

 or the chief, the fines derived from those who smoke, or swear, or work 

 upon a Sunday, may well be imagined, and moreover, altogether too 

 large a share of the earned wealth of the natives is demanded from 

 them, the revenues of the church in certain groups being decidedly 

 larger than the taxes collected by the civil government. 



Yet let us not blind ourselves to an appreciation of the fundamental 

 good the missions have accomplished, for whether Christianity be true 

 or false, the natives must live under the rule of a people actuated by 

 its motives and its faith, and are thus through its acquisition ines- 

 timably better fitted to resist the evil that preys upon them with the 

 advent of "civilization." 



In Fiji, however, the natives had become thoroughly known to the 

 missionaries before the great conversion of 1854, and many old customs 

 were thus permitted to remain which would have been suppressed had 

 the missionary, and the political party which inevitably springs up 

 around him, came more quickly into power. 



The power of the missionary, after the great chiefs cast in their 

 lot with him, is indeed terrible for good or evil, and in Tonga and later 

 in Fiji he connived at the arming of the natives in order to conquer 

 "converts." As the struggling priest of a great religion the mission- 

 ary inspires all respect, but as the crafty politician or bigoted inquisitor 

 his actions become correspondingly reprehensible. Too often in those 

 early days of missionary endeavor he seemed satisfied with a mere 

 semblance of order and religion for this was the period in which faith 

 rather than good works was deemed essential. To the natives he too 

 often remained one of a foreign race — a wizard, terrible, mysterious 

 and implacable. Happily, a change has come over the thought of the 

 world, and the conditions we describe are not those of to-day. 



Henceforth Thakombau was to remain nominally king in Fiji, but 

 the real power was vested in the white men who had settled upon his 

 shores. He had escaped the retribution of native revenge only to 

 struggle hopelessly in the net of commercialism and diplomacy. It was 

 a sad and disappointing period between the time of the conversion in 

 1854 and the annexation to Great Britain in 1874. Soon after Thakom- 



vol. lxxxvii. — 3. 



