But the attempt to reduce these rights to written law was most unfortunate. Chiefs who were landlords were, at a stroke of the pen, given the right to exact personal _lala_ from tribes who were not their tenants; and throughout quite half the group, the right to personal _lala_ was conferred upon chiefs who were not landlords at all, and had no claim to it whatever. Confusion became worse confounded when the hereditary chiefs were expelled from office for misconduct, and persons of inferior rank were appointed to succeed not only to their official duties, but to their private rights to personal _lala_. Had the question been understood it would have been easy to frame a regulation of limiting the exercise of personal _lala_ to those chiefs entitled to it by ancient usage, allowing each disputed case to be decided on its merits, and to limit the holders of government offices of _Roko Tui_ and _Mbuli_ to _lala_ for communal purposes. It says much for the tenacity of customary law that the chiefs took so little advantage of the ignorance of the government--an ignorance that may be compared with the mistakes made by the Indian government in the matter of the Ryots. The chiefs of the miniature republics of western Fiji have never attempted to claim personal _lala_, and even chiefs, such as _Roko Tui Ra_, who were brought from other provinces by the government to be _Roko Tui_ over people who had never been federated under a paramount chief, have used their powers very sparingly, although they were placed in the false position of having to maintain large establishments on very insufficient salaries. [Pageheader: _LALA_ RECEIVES LEGAL SANCTION]