The sum at which “foreign labour” is usually to be had is about £10 for passage-money, and £9 for three years’ work. This is generally paid in the form of goods to be taken home to the distant isles, and is one of the points found to require special Government inspection, the quantity and quality of goods supplied to the unsophisticated natives by sundry traders (on receipt of a planter’s order for £9 worth of stuff per head) being by no means calculated to give the onlookers a high view of white men’s commercial morality. The importation of foreign labour is now entirely in the hands of a Government immigration agent, to whom the owners and captains of all vessels employed in the labour trade are responsible for strict observance of sanitary and other rules, and through whom every master must engage his men and make all payments, and to whom he must return them at the date when their engagement expires, that they may be restored to their own homes at the time agreed on. Of course during the term of service the employer supplies food and tobacco, lodging (such as it is, in most cases), medicine, and a very small amount of raiment. But the hideous stories of kidnapping and brutal ill-treatment on board ship, or even on plantations, are now happily tales of the past. The supply of labourers is one of the vexed questions of the present, as each year the labour vessels bring back a smaller number of volunteers from the other groups; and the employment of Fijians on the plantations of white men is in no way encouraged by Government, which recognises as its first duty the care and preservation of these, the true owners of the soil, by whose own invitation, and for whose welfare primarily, England here rules. Considering how invariably dark races have been found to die out before the advance of the white races, the problem of whether this evil cannot be averted in the present instance is one of the deepest interest. It is therefore considered of the utmost importance that the natives should remain in their own villages, subject to their own chiefs, and cultivating their own lands, both for their own benefit and to enable them to contribute their just proportion of the Government taxes, which it has been found desirable to collect in produce from gardens specially cultivated for this purpose by each village. Now that the number of the people has been so appallingly reduced by measles, it is the more desirable that those that survive should not be encouraged to leave their homes. Consequently a comparatively small number of Fijians are in the service of white men, who, as a rule, are not anxious to secure the labour of men from neighbouring villages, but endeavour to engage those from other isles, who thus are virtually as much strangers in a strange land are as the labourers imported from other groups. It is said that only under these circumstances are Fijians found willing to work diligently on the plantations—no great wonder, considering how easily