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XIV.

AMATEUR LAW-GIVING.

THE dismissed Premier was not only a spiritual and temporal dignitary, he was also the lawgiver of Tonga; yet it was only in the most limited sense that he united the qualities of Moses and Melchisedec.

It has been the fate of Tonga to furnish the vile body on which the legislative experiments of amateurs have been tried. The first written code of law in Tongan history was promulgated in Vavau in 1839, and, crude though it was, it may be doubted whether it was not far better suited to the people than the elaborate but often incoherent effusions of the missionary lawyers of later days. It was King George's own composition, and it was intended for his own people only, to be administered by judges of his own race. There was a long preamble filled with Biblical quotations, after which follow a few plain straightforward clauses such as the following:

It is my mind: That vation and be planted. you to turn your hogs

the land should be brought into culti Hence, I inform you it is unlawful for outside the sty. If a hog be found

eating the yams, or destroying the produce of the land, the owner of the hog shall be at once informed that he may shut the hog up, and he shall restore whatsoever be damaged. If the owner neglect to take warning, either in confining his hog, or in recompensing the damage done, and the hog be again found eating the yams, it shall then be lawful to kill the hog, and the owner of the plantation shall have the carcase for his own.

By the end of 1855 the original code had been so tinkered by the missionaries that little of the original remained. Their hand is detected in the following excellent provision, designed to

check the growing in

A giant yam.

dolence of the people, and turn their labour into a channel. of profit to the reverend legislators :

XXXVI. The law relating to men. -You shall work and persevere in labouring for the support of your family as well as yourself, and in order to contribute to the cause of God and the chief of the land, and each man shall find a piece of land to cultivate. Any man who is not willing to work, shall not be fed nor assisted, all such persons being useless to the land and its inhabitants, and unprofitable to their friends.

Hitherto the laws had merely expressed in writing the prohibitions that already existed in the native mind, but for which no fixed punishment had been stipulated. The government by chiefs was defined and their powers described, but it was the same form of government that had been in force since the social organisation of the people was crystallised out of the primitive family. King Georgeto his credit be it said-long resisted the importunities of the missionaries to grant his people a Constitution, and ape the form of government evolved in Europe from centuries of civilisation. The people were not ready for it, he said. It might suit England very well. There the people were perhaps accustomed to think for themselves, but the Tongans were wont to let their chiefs think for them.

Their

The Tongans had reached a stage of development midway between the patriarchal and feudal systems. chiefs had the blood of the founder of the family in its purest form, and were the earthly incarnation of their deified ancestors. Each chief had hereditary retainers who followed him to battle, and obeyed him in time of peace; but the constant wars during the latter half of the eighteenth century had created a lower class of ser vants than these-the tu'a, children of prisoners of war. These, together with the illegitimate children of the chief's father or grandfather (his cousins, in fact, for a chief bred servants for his descendants), were in the nature of serfs, leading, however, an easier life than such a designation would imply. The missionaries had perhaps read of Peter the Great and Wilberforce, and they too panted to win the grateful admiration of posterity.

THE CONSTITUTION GRANTED.

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their heated fancy the people appeared as slaves, because they yielded service without fixed wages, and nothing would content them but a formal liberation. They did not stop to reflect that these "serfs" were fed and clothed by their chief, and that as members of his household they enjoyed privileges which men of their low rank could not hope for in other societies. If they were contented, they ought to be taught a noble discontent, and to pine for the Anglo-Saxon fetish, freedom. King George, as he hoped to be saved, must "liberate the serfs."

In 1862 he yielded, and signed a bran-new Constitution, drawn up by the missionaries, after a model devised for the King of Hawaii by a Mr St Julian. On the 4th of June 1862 there was a solemn meeting of the newly constituted Parliament. In the intervals of feasting the code was passed, and at the end of two months the legislators dispersed, leaving the land as bare as if a swarm of locusts had passed over it. The missionary historian waxes emotional as he tells of how they contrived to eat 150,000 large yams and 9000 hogs, besides other provisions, and of how they feasted daily at a board spread in European fashion, clad in decent black broadcloth and white chokers, to the glory of God and the triumph of missionary statecraft.

This code was considerably altered,—I reject the word "amended" advisedly, and in 1875 a complete penal code, far too elaborate for the Tongans, yet infinitely better than the pretentious laws that afterwards repealed it, was passed by the native Parliament. From 1875 to 1888 Mr Baker tried his 'prentice hand at legislation. He altered the Constitution four times, and he drafted

and passed laws and ordinances whenever the fit took him, until the body of law had become so confused and conflicting that not even a Blackstone could have cut a path through its thorny labyrinths. Some of these laws were not even read to the Parliament that passed them: more than a few were enacted in English, and never translated into Tongan. Of these, some were printed in the 'Gazette' in English; others had not even this courtesy extended to them. The fatal ease of legislation bred in the Premier's mind a kind of disease-Legislatitis-until every idea that flitted through his facile imagination was crystallised into an ordinance, and the cause of every passing annoyance was made penal by enactment. Some one remarked that the wild duck were becoming scarce: an ordinance was passed to preserve them. A ship-ofwar was disappointed in not finding coal: a statute converted Nukualofa into a coaling-station for foreign ships. Some urchins shouted Sail ho!" on the beach near the Premier's office: to cry "Sail ho!" became forthwith a penal offence. Many of these enactments were extremely unpopular; but the wily Premier knew how to let the fury of the mob beat upon other heads than his, and generally caused his laws to be promulgated the day after he sailed for one of his frequent holidays to New Zealand. By the time he returned the people had become accustomed to them.

The confused state of the law had a remarkable effect upon the magistrates. The only written law within their reach had been so often altered and repealed that they had come to rely for their decisions not upon the written law, but upon the verbal directions of the Prime Minister.