The Prince and the Nobles

Feather Sceptre from Hawaii. (Christy Collection.)

Ownership in the soil is respected within the close community of the village, but not always beyond its limits. The soil is everywhere divided into village-lands, fields, or gardens, and waste. The former are accurately known, parcel by parcel, while to the last there is no clear title; though in Fiji its alienation by the chiefs seems to have been felt as an infringement of the common rights of property. The sale of land was not at all usual in pre-European times. In view of the facts that the land of the "two sides" often lies mixed up in small plots of ground, so that land which the father has reclaimed is to be found all among the mother's hereditary domains, and that the rights to fruit trees and to the soil may be vested in different persons, the problems of conveyance are often insoluble. There is no private property in land, only a usufruct through the family which cultivates its piece. Only what a man has cleared and tilled with his own hand and the help of his children remains his own and passes to them.

Claims to rent on the part of the chiefs do not seem primitive. But at the present day, if in the Solomon Islands a subject omits to hand over to the chief a portion of his profits from the harvest, or the fishery, or of booty taken, he commits a delinquency. In Fiji, military services, which took precedence of all others, led in the event of a success to new grants of land, with all the inhabitants as slaves; entailing fresh obligations on the recipients. In many cases the entire relation of subjects to a prince became one of gifts on the side of the former only.

The conditions of property among the Maoris perhaps correspond most nearly to a primitive state of things. We may suppose that no individual possession was valid here, each regarding the common land as his own. In other places a wounded man could claim a title to ground on which drops of his blood had fallen. Hunting and fishing grounds remained common property. In Melanesia sons could enter as heirs upon property left by their father on condition of indemnifying his nephews by gifts of pigs, teeth, or shells. If he left only daughters, the nephews of the male side inherited in preference; and under this law the children's property was several, while in the case of nephews and others inheriting under mother-right it remained collective.

Among the Maoris the strict rule seems to have been broken in this respect, that tribal property was inalienable. According as the husband lived with the wife's tribe, or the wife with the husband's, the children followed. But the maternal tribe always claims the child of those who pertain to it, even when they have married into another. The loss which a tribe undergoes by the transference of children born within it, and their property, to the mother's tribe, the latter endeavours to supply by gifts of land. But since the children generally marry in the same tribe, the land never passes out of the tribe's ownership.

King Lunalilo of Hawaii, (From a photograph.)

Class and tribal organisation with the Polynesians forbids a distribution of the soil among families, but it could not, in the event of the great development of a chiefs power, prevent the tribal right from being administered by an individual. Thus in Hawaii tribal rights of ownership have become transferred to the chief, and his subjects either cultivate a portion of the land for him, or else have to offer him the first-fruits of every harvest, or render compulsory service two days out of seven. Till quite recently he even received a quarter of all wages earned by his subjects. They belonged to the land; and the lower classes were treated as serfs, bound to the soil. A proof that this dependence was patriarchal, and not felt as oppressive, is furnished by the fact that the sudden abolition of it through Christianity has been indicated as one cause of the decrease of the population.

In Tonga also a similar system has grown up, while in the Gilberts the population is divided into Tokker, landowners; Torro, people who are allowed to enjoy the usufruct of the land; and Bei, landless varlets, whom the lord can make into Torro by a grant of land. The owners govern almost exclusively, even where there are nominal kings. Almost everywhere in Polynesia, indeed, the larger landowners generally exercise influence on the government. The Bei, though distinguished neither by clothing nor way of life, seldom marry into the higher classes.