I90 MELANESIA AND ITS PEOPLE. 
In the more settled islands and districts provision can be made quite 
easily for the due employment of the people at regular and systematic 
work, so as to guard against the danger of idleness. ‘There is ample 
land available everywhere for use either in growing the crops of food or 
for planting in coconuts. Hunger ought to be a thing of the past; the 
islands hardly know what a drought is; the foodstuffs, both indigenous 
and introduced, are many and varied, and it needs only sufficient 
land to be kept under cultivation to insure a plentiful and regular 
supply of food. This is clear in our experience, for in our own garden 
at Ulawa, which was under the care of Elwin Dume, a man of Mera- 
lava, there was always a supply of food, sweet potatoes, yams, pana, 
pumpkins, tapioca (cassava), and even taro (which the people of the 
place said would not grow in Ulawa), bananas, and pineapples. It 
often was the case that when our garden was bearing well others were 
searching for food. Elwin used to return home through the village 
unconcernedly smoking his pipe and with the tip of a yam showing 
out of his bag. ‘‘Oh! look at these white men (mwa haka),’’ the 
people would exclaim as he passed, “‘they have yams while we have 
to go and scratch in the forest for food!”’ 
The exercise of due control both by the Mission and by government 
ought to obviate the dangers both of idleness and of hunger. As more 
and more traders come in, the danger will be that pressure is put on 
the government to acquire suitable land for planting, and great care 
will have to be taken that sufficient land is left in the neighborhood 
of the centers of population for the use of the people. On an island 
like Ugi in the Solomons very large tracts have been alienated, the 
original owners are but few, and possession is the more easily acquired. 
It is recalled that in the case of the sale of one large tract near the orig- 
inal trading station at Selwyn Bay the land was said to have been sold 
by a man who had only the very flimsiest right to it, since he was not 
an Ugi man at all but an adopted person. 
The cure for the existing evils and the means of staving off the 
threatened extinction of the people do not lie in their employment on 
plantations, as some hold. The moral elevation of the people and 
their advance in civilization used to be held up as valid reasons for 
their being recruited to work in Queensland, but from internal evidence 
one would say that the main influence which the labor trade has had 
on Melanesia is that it has sadly depopulated the islands. ‘There has 
been no social elevation through the trade; the want of cohesion among 
the natives, apart from all other considerations, would have been 
sufficient to prevent it. The thousands of men who, throughout the 
years the trade was in existence, returned from civilization did nothing 
to better the conditions of life among their neighbors; they dissem- 
inated no knowledge, they started no spiritual movement for the 
uplifting of their people, they stirred up no divine discontent with 
