48 THE CORAL LANDS OF THE PACIFIC. 



or temperance in New Zealand or New South Wales, had 

 obligingly come down to Fiji, there to add to immoderate gin- 

 drinking a taste for slave-driving, which, with tropical effron- 

 tery, they called the labour trade ; and as their proceedings in 

 this exhilarating branch of commerce often required the 

 interference of Her Majesty's war-ships, with possible incon- 

 venience to their officers and crews, it was judged far better to 

 take the whole thing over, annex these obnoxious islands as a 

 Crown colony of a severe type, and so prevent the cannibals 

 from eating the madmen, and the madmen from selling the 

 cannibals.' 



I need hardly add that the assumptions referred to are 

 gratuitous libels. There was such a thing as 'blackbirding' or 

 man-stealing for providing labour carried on by scoundrels of 

 every nationality under heaven, and to a limited extent Fiji 

 was for a time one of the numerous centres of their operations. 

 But I do not hesitate to say that the great majority of the Fiji 

 settlers never countenanced the trade, and only asked for 

 labourers on fair terms. The colonists I met with were as 

 a rule gentlemen by birth and education; and if one takes 

 grasp of subject, general knowledge, and honest courtesy as a 

 criterion of intellectual strength, a comparison might be 

 established between a smoking-party of Fijian planters and an 

 equal number of men in the smoking-room of a London club, 

 and I fancy that the comparison would end favourably for Fiji. 



In matters ecclesiastical Levuka is not behind the times. The 

 best church is undoubtedly that of the Catholics, which 

 possesses a peal of bells. The chief of the Roman missionaries, 

 Father Bretheret, has been thirty-five years in the group, and 

 is most deservedly loved by all, whether inside the 'pale' or 

 out of it. Father Bretheret is one of the Marist order, and is, I 

 believe, Vicar Apostolic of Fiji. The Catholics have not any- 



