454 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 



great war -dances and other ceoemonies. There are at 

 least twenty quite distinct languages spoken in the 

 archipelago. In the small island of Tanna alone there 

 are no less than six, all mutually unintelligible. 



The New Hebrides formed at one time the almost sole 

 recruiting-ground of the labour traffic, the natives being 

 taken away in large numbers — often by force or fraud — 

 to work on the plantations of Queensland, Fiji, and New 

 Caledonia. There is much difference of opinion as to 

 the effects of this traffic. Mr. A. Trollope, who has seen 

 the natives at work in Queensland, thinks it must be 

 beneficial ; that the islanders learn lessons of civilisation 

 and that work produces property ; that they learn to 

 sow, dig, plant, and to clothe themselves. Mr. F. A. 

 Campbell, who has studied the returned labourer in his 

 native x^lace, gives a very different picture. He declares 

 that the New Hebrideans are not in the least improved, but 

 rather injured, by their three years' labour. Whatever 

 goods they bring home are at once distributed among 

 their friends and relations ; they throw off their clothes, 

 paint themselves, and resume with eager delight all the 

 savage practices they have so long been deprived of. 

 The only accomplishmeut they bring back, and of whicli 

 they are proud, is the facility of swearing in English. 

 They not only relapse into their old ways, but become 

 more degraded, if that be possible, and certainly more 

 vicious ; for the plantations turn out some of the most 

 accomplished specimens of savage scoundrelism imagin- 

 able — men who have engrafted on their originally 

 depraved nature the vices of civilisation but none of its 

 virtues. On the whole, there can be little doubt that, 

 viewed in every aspect, there is an overwhelming pre- 

 ponderance of evil in this modified slave trade. The 

 absolute savage cannot be improved by taking him away 



