454 
COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
great war-dances and other ceremonies. 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 place, 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 accomplishment they bring back, and of which 
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 
