IX

According to the Samoa Times of May 29, 1925, the Administrator, at the half-yearly Faipule Fono, preached this creed, which no doubt will excite the interest of philosophers:

"Samoa is now starting to progress. The needs of the people are increasing. You know that your needs and your progress cannot be provided without money. There is no gold in the rocks of Samoa, but the products of your land can be turned into money which will give you all that you require. Your plantations must be made to grow not only your food but those things from which alone you can get money. Only those products which you send to other countries can you turn into money. Every pound of copra, cocoa, cotton, sent away in ships brings page break

A Native Plantation

page 191money back to Samoa, but those things you consume locally do not make Samoa any richer; therefore, year by year strive your best to produce and plant more coco-nuts, more cocoa, and more cotton. If you do these things all your troubles will disappear.

"But Samoa will never progress until a change is made in the Native system of land ownership. The present system must be changed to individual holdings…."

The Administrator's endeavour to alter the communal land system was on a par with most of his other innovations. The lands in question were vested in the names of the various Matai or heads of families, and used for the benefit of the respective families. (Thus those who were deprived of their titles might also be permanently divested of their agrarian rights, by the title being presented in the meantime to another.) To individualize the land was to rob the chiefs and orators of their last vestige of authority, and would have entailed the overthrow of the whole social machine. What possible justification was there for the risk there involved?

The old system of land tenure had worked very well from time immemorial. The people were happy. Poverty and want were unknown. Who then, knowing the humiliation, frustration, and agony of mind, to say nothing of hardship, that shortage of money with us can entail, would beneficently think to convert these people to an individualistic and monetary system?

However, lest I be considered biased, I will give the missionary angle:

"This communistic system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a canker-worm at the roots of individual or national progress. No matter how hard a young man may be disposed to work, he cannot keep his earnings: all soon passes out of his hands into the common circulating currency of the clan to which all have a latent right. The only thing which reconciles one to bear with it until it gives place to the individual independence of more advanced civilization, is the fact that, with such a state of things, no 'poor laws' are needed. The sick, the aged, the blind, the lame, and even the vagrant, has always a house and a home, and food and raiment, as far as he con-page 192siders he needs it. A stranger may, at first sight, think a Samoan one of the poorest of the poor, and yet he may live ten years with that Samoan and not be able to make him understand what poverty really is, in the European sense of the word. 'How is it?' he will always say. 'No food! Has he no friends? No house to live in! Where did he grow? Are there no houses belonging to his friends? Have the people there no love for each other?'"¹

Nothing in the foregoing passage alters my opinion that it was a retrogressive move to attempt to alter the existing system. And even if the power of the chiefs and consanguine collectivism had been replaced by individualism and an aristocracy of General Richardson's own creation, I do not believe for a moment that it would have increased production.