Once I recall seeing two hundred prisoners, all armed with long
knives, engaged in cutting weeds along the roadside, chanting
happily as they slashed, while a solitary native dressed only
in a waist-cloth and armed only with a club stood guard at one
end of the line, and this not near the prison, but in a lonely
wood fully a mile from the nearest house.

In 1874, the British undertook the unique task of civilizing
without exploiting a barbarous and degraded race which was
drifting hopelessly into ruin. They began the solution of this
complex problem by arresting the entire race and immuring them
within the protecting walls of a system which recognized as its
cardinal principle that the natives were unfit to think or act
for themselves. For a generation the Fijians have been in a
prison wherein they have become the happiest and best behaved
captives upon earth. During this time they have become
reconciled to a life of peace, and have forgotten the taste of
human flesh; and while they cherish no love for the white man,
they feel the might of his law and know that his decrees are as
finalities of fate. All are serving life sentences to the white
man's will, and the fire of their old ambition has cooled into
the dull embers of resignation and then died into the apathy of
contentment with things that are. Worse still, they have grown
fond of their prison world, and the most pessimistic feature in
the Fijian situation of to-day is the evident fact that there
is almost no discontent among the natives. Old things have
withered and decayed, but new ambition has not been born.

It is in no spirit of criticism of British policy that I have
written the above paragraph for it was absolutely necessary