PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 523 
remarkable. In other words, the victim survives only just so long as he is 
remembered. Captain Cook, we know, survived for very long, perhaps does 
so still; few, if any, of such beachcombers as were later killed in Fiji survived 
for any length of time; and the innumerable natives who were drifted or washed 
to one or other of the islands must for the most part have passed from memory 
soon after they were killed. 
It has been suggested that the killing of strangers may have been for the 
purpose of preventing the introduction of disease; and it is certain that, 
perhaps even before the coming of white men, the islanders recognised that the 
advent of strangers was curiously often and most disastrously followed by the 
introduction of new diseases, either real diseases or at least some queer, unex- 
plained influence which has so often made life not worth living for savages 
where white strangers have been, 
The Fijians were hardly more notorious for cannibalism than for theft—and 
almost as undeservedly. ‘There is hardly an account of the visit of a European 
ship in early times to any of the islands which does not mention that the islanders 
who came aboard took whatever they fancied, either quite openly or if furtively 
then without evincing anything like shame when discovered. This habit, which 
the explorers naturally called theft, was but the manifestation of a South Sea 
custom, due to the entire absence of any idea of personal property, which 
in Fiji is called keri-keri. To keri-keri was to take whatever you wanted and 
could take without the previous holder of the property preventing you. In old 
days no Fijian doubted his own absolute right to keri-keri, nor did he feel the 
very slightest shame in thus (as we should say) ‘depriving another of his 
property’ or ‘stealing’; and even to this day the Fijian, provided that he is 
not really Europeanised, will keri-keri without shame. In short the idea of 
ownership and individual property never occurred to the natural Fijian. He 
took what he wanted, and was strong enough to take. But, on the other hand, 
he yielded up, practically without reluctance, whatever another stronger or 
cleverer than himself wanted and was able to take from him. 
Of the many other charges of ‘savagery ’ made against Fijians, I can, in the 
time at my disposal, deal with but one more, that as to their strange and grue: 
some habit of celebrating great occasions by killing their own folk. When a 
Fijian chief died, as we should say, or, as it seemed to the surviving natives, 
when his soul left the body which it had for a time used, his widows, and other 
of his kindred and dependents, unwilling to be left behind, were strangled, often 
indeed helped to strangle themselves, that their bodies might be put into the 
graves, while their souls went gladly with that of the chief whom they had been 
accustomed to follow. 
Again, when a chief built a house, some of his dependents, whom the great 
man told off for the purpose, willingly stepped down into the holes which had 
been dug for the house-posts, and remained there while the earth was filled in 
on to them, and continued thereafter as permanent supporters of the house. 
Again, there is a tradition, which at least was not incredible to the natives, 
that a great chief one day went a-fishing, and caught many fish. Two 
brothers of humbler rank who happened to have come down to the same water- 
side, also to fish, were less successful. The chief, in a characteristic freak of 
generosity, presented his best fish to the elder of the two brothers, who, strictly 
according to Fijian custom, accepted the gift, but felt bound to make an 
immediate return, but he had nothing to give. Thereupon the younger brother, 
at his own suggestion, was clubbed by the elder, and his body presented to the 
chief in token that his soul would thereafter serve that chief. 
It is even said that when yams and other vegetables were brought in as 
food for the chiefs by the dependents who had grown them for that purpose, 
the food-bearers, if there was a scarcity of fish or other suitable accompaniment 
for the vegetable diet, were themselves clubbed and their bodies eaten. This 
particular atrocity probably happened only after the habit of cannibalism had, 
as already explained, been unnaturally intensified. But the story is note- 
worthy in that the food-bearers are not represented as in any way dreading or 
shirking the use to which their bodies were put. 
In all these and similar cases it is to be noted that the victims (as we are 
naturally inclined to call them) were more ov less indifferent, if indeed they 
