The tenure of land is nearly as difficult a question in Fiji as in New Zealand. It is difficult enough when discussed between natives, but when the matter is complicated by a quarrel between natives and colonists, it becomes a very apple of discord. Neither party can quite understand the other. The European colonist who buys land from a native chief purchases, according to his ideas, a complete property in the land, and control over it. The native who sells it has never conceived such an idea as the total alienation of land, and, in consequence, if the purchaser should happen to leave any part of the land unoccupied, the natives will build their houses upon it, and till it as before. Then as in process of time the proprietor wants to use his ground for his own purposes, the natives refuse to be ejected, and there is a quarrel. The state of the case is very well put by Dr. Pritchard: “Every inch of land in Fiji has its owner. Every parcel or tract of ground has a name, and the boundaries are defined and well-known. The proprietorship rests in families, the heads of families being the representatives of the title. Every member of the family can use the lands attaching to the family. Thus the heads of families are the nominal owners, the whole family are the actual occupiers. The family land maintains the whole family, and the members maintain the head of the family. [Illustration: PRESENTATION OF THE CANOE. (See page 936.)] “A chief holds his lands under precisely the same tenure, as head of his family, and his _personal_ rights attain only to the land pertaining to his family, in which right every member of his family shares so far as on any portion of the land. But the chief is also head of his tribe, and, as such, certain rights to the whole lands of the tribe appertain to him. The tribe is a family, and the chief is the head of the family. “The families of a tribe maintain the chief. In war they give him their services, and follow him to the fight. In peace they supply him with food. In this way, the whole tribe attains a certain collective interest in all the lands held by each family; and every parcel of land alienated contracts the source whence the collective tribal support of the chief is drawn. From this complicated tenure it is clear that the alienation of land, however large or small the tract, can be made valid only by the collective act of the whole tribe, in the persons of the ruling chief and the heads of families. Random and reckless land transactions under these circumstances would be simply another seizure of Naboth’s vineyard, for which the price of blood would inevitably have to be paid.”