allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent miles
there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal. For the Samoan besides,
there is something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd in the idea of thus
growing food only to send it from the land and sell it. A man at home
who should turn all Yorkshire into one wheatfield, and annually burn his
harvest on the altar of Mumbo-Jumbo, might impress ourselves not much
otherwise. And the firm which does these things is quite extraneous, a
wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but to itself; few
natives drawing from it so much as day's wages; and the rest beholding in
it only the occupier of their acres. The nearest villages have suffered
most; they see over the hedge the lands of their ancestors waving with
useless cocoa-palms; and the sales were often questionable, and must
still more often appear so to regretful natives, spinning and improving
yarns about the evening lamp. At the worst, then, to help oneself from
the plantation will seem to a Samoan very like orchard-breaking to the
British schoolboy; at the best, it will be thought a gallant
Robin-Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.

And there is more behind. Not only is theft from the plantations
regarded rather as a lark and peccadillo, the idea of theft in itself is
not very clearly present to these communists; and as to the punishment of
crime in general, a great gulf of opinion divides the natives from
ourselves. Indigenous punishments were short and sharp. Death,
deportation by the primitive method of setting the criminal to sea in a
canoe, fines, and in Samoa itself the penalty of publicly biting a hot,
ill-smelling root, comparable to a rough forfeit in a children's
game--these are approved. The offender is killed, or punished and
forgiven. We, on the other hand, harbour malice for a period of years:
continuous shame attaches to the criminal; even when he is doing his
best--even when he is submitting to the worst form of torture, regular