ll its actuality and the part played in it by
mails and telegraphs and iron war-ships, the ideas and the manners of the
native actors date back before the Roman Empire. They are Christians,
church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers;
their books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Truebner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of
the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period of communism. And this makes them hard to understand.

To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land
of despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my-lord each other when they meet--and urchins as they play
marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a
pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence, as the
common names for a bug and for many offices and members of the body are
taboo in the drawing-rooms of English ladies. Special words are set
apart for his leg, his face, his hair, his belly, his eyelids, his son,
his daughter, his wife, his wife's pregnancy, his wife's adultery,
adultery with his wife, his dwelling, his spear, his comb, his sleep,
his dreams, his anger, the mutual anger of several chiefs, his food, his
pleasure in eating, the food and eating of his pigeons, his ulcers, his
cough, his sickness, his recovery, his death, his being carried on a
bier, the exhumation of his bones, and his skull after death. To address
these demigods is quite a branch of knowledge, and he who goes to visit
a high chief does well to make sure of the competence of his
interpreter. To complete the picture, the same word signifies the
watching of a virgin and the warding of a chief; and the same word means
to cherish a chief and to fondle a favourite child.

Men like us, full of memories of feudalism, hear of a man so addressed,
so flattered, and we leap at once to the conclusion that he is
hereditary and absolute. Hereditary he is; born of a great family, he
must always be a man of mark; but yet his office is elective and (in a
weak sense) is held on good behaviour. Compare the case of a Highla