168 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA. 
the Solomons and Santa Cruz as established by the erratics of the whale 
fishery. For the latter communication it has been possible to estab- 
lish a satisfactory and quite innocent explanation; far other in the case 
of these which have just been examined. The motive of these three 
erratics had its beginning half around the world in conditions which 
only the wildest feat of the imagination could associate with cannibal 
peoples of the western Pacific. 
The long continuance of civil turmoil in this country a half century 
ago was felt around the world even to these islands of the uttermost sea. 
The presence of these erratics in regions where normally they should 
not be found is as much a consequence of the political theory of state 
sovereignty and the fugitive-slave law as were Gettysburg and Appo- 
mattox, for such is the balance of the world. When the blockade of the 
Southern ports was complete the cotton spinners of Great Britain were 
brought to penury; every warm region of the world which could be 
made to grow cotton was set to the task of supporting Manchester. 
Fiji was no exception, nor were the other islands of Nuclear Polynesia 
where soil could be found for such agriculture, but Fiji above all by 
reason of the extent of the diluvium in the deltas of its really great 
rivers, the Rewa and the Ba. In the Fijian social polity there was no 
plan for the wage-earner; each man did his little task for the support of 
the family commune; when that task was completed there was neither 
inducement nor compulsion to essay labor from which others were to 
reap the profit. Therefore, in Fiji arose the labor question, out of the 
qtiestion arose the labor trade, and when the colony of Queensland 
entered upon the cultivation of sugar the labor trade assumed enor- 
mous proportions. ‘To preserve a face of respectability this system of 
enforced labor, technically indentured labor, was made moral by legis- 
lation which really did no more than give it the dignity of capital 
initials as the Labor Trade under acts of Parliament and of colonial 
legislatures and the sanction of an unimportant king or two. It was 
slavery none the less; it was a slave trade; and in the fifteen years 
between 1865 and 1880 it depopulated the western Pacific and destroyed 
the peoples of many islands. 
There was toward the end of the period some salutary pretense of 
returning the indentured laborer eventually to his own. That was 
insisted upon by some manner of government supervision. There is a 
sense of satisfaction in the evidence of the pandanus club from Ysobel 
and the ula from New Guinea that two at least of the slaves reached 
their own homes and brought back with them new weapons which set 
their feet on a firmer hold on life. 
But this commerce in humanity was carried out by men who recked 
not of sympathy for the kanaka; government could not obtain men of 
better nature at the meager wages of the labor agent. So long as each 
returning laborer was set ashore upon some island in order that the 
