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
civilisation, 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 home, and food and raiment, as far
as he considers 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?"




CHAPTER XIV.

CANOES.


Next to a well-built house, Samoan ingenuity was seen in their canoes.
Any one could fell a tree, cut off the branches, and hollow out the
log some fifteen feet long, for a common fishing canoe in which one or
two men can sit. But the more carefully-built canoe, with a number of
separate planks raised from a keel, was the work of a distinct and not