Communal _lala_ is also indispensable for the performance of all public works, such as road-making, bridge-building; the erection of public meeting-houses, such as the church or _Mbure-ni-sa_, and it was also legitimately applied to such quasi-communal services as the repair of the chief's canoe or house, the planting of food and catching fish, for the entertainment of strangers coming to trade with the tribe. In this respect the _lala_ corresponds closely with our system of local rates. When exercised by the supreme chief to levy contributions for the equipment of an army or an embassy, it may fitly be compared with public taxation. Without it, the condition of the natives' houses, already bad, would become worse; their crops, already diminished, would become insufficient for their support; their villages, often now neglected, would become unfit for habitation, and the purchase and maintenance of boats and vessels become impossible. Where it has been abolished, as in Tonga and the Tongan community settled in Fiji, the necessity for combination is so keenly felt that the people have evolved a substitute of their own. Men and women voluntarily form themselves into clubs called _Kabani_ (company) under various fanciful names, which are called together under the direction of an elected president to build houses, plant gardens, and do other combined work for one another. Disobedience to the order of the president is visited by a money fine, or by expulsion. A person who belongs to no club can obtain no assistance from his fellows. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the history of the _corvée_ in Egypt or the _rajakarya_ of Ceylon to say whether they, like the _lala_, were instituted to meet the necessity of combination among a primitive people. The _rajakarya_, we know, was abolished because the high chiefs much abused it, but they did not begin to do so until the law of custom had begun to decay, owing to intercourse with Europeans. We had the _lala_ ourselves up to the thirteenth century, or the magnificent churches of the Norman and Gothic periods would never have been built by people who were content to live in thatched hovels: in Scotland it survived until much later. [Pageheader: LIMITATIONS OF THE _LALA_]