XII
Missionaries.

In our efforts to induce the people to pay their taxes, our principal competitors were not the traders, but the Churches. There was but one money-harvest in the year, and the directors of the several bodies that preyed upon the Tongans—the Government, the two Wesleyan missions, and in a lesser degree the Eoman Catholics—set themselves to reap the golden crop simultaneously as soon as the sun had dried the copra. I must admit that the Wesleyans, in their anxiety to prove their loyalty, did not hold their missionary collections until the majority of their people had paid their taxes. The other missions were less considerate, and took largely of the things that were Caesar's. The fakamisonali is so characteristic an entertainment that I must attempt to describe one.

For some days previously six or seven chosen vessels had been canvassing their friends on behalf of the plates for which they were to be responsible on the great day. There was a keen rivalry between them, and to the importunities of one of them I fell a victim, defending page 186myself from the others by sheltering behind the promise I had given him not to contribute to any plate but his. Their method was ingenious. The tout took care to approach his victim in the evening when the house was full of people. He would remark that Pita (a neighbour) had promised two dollars this year, and would hint that he scarcely supposes the victim will allow himself to be outdone by such a one as Pita! The unfortunate man, constrained by false shame, promises more than he can afford; the amount is noted in a book, and has to be found by importunity or petty larceny.

As the day drew nearer we were set upon by numbers of the faithful, including our convict groom, who came to borrow money to give to the Church. For these I had but one form of argument—forcible if not altogether reverent. They were, I said, proposing to give my money to the Church—not their own; and as it was extremely unlikely that they would ever pay me back, and therefore either I or the Church would have to go without the money, I thought the Church was better able to afford the loss. Cynics among the traders even went the length of declaring that the fakamisonali is always accompanied by the disappearance of their ducks and fowls, which may generally be found in the yard of a rival trader living at a distance, who has innocently bought them from a native bent upon contributing his mite to the Church. This is no doubt a slander.

On the appointed day the whole population donned their gala trousers and petticoats, and streamed to the church, whose big bell was being tolled by relays of urchins. The pews were crowded: there was not even page 187standing-room round the walls. At the pulpit end was a semicircle of seats for the European aristocracy, including, of course, Mr M—, the contractor for the Government copra, who aspired to be thought the deliverer of oppressed Tongans, and could not therefore allow such an opportunity for advertisement to pass.

How shall I describe the scene that followed? How shall I portray the unction of the presiding missionary, as he poured forth his prayers for a full plate in a voice shaken with emotion, the roar of "Malo!" as each sentiment found expression, the rich smiles of the owners of the filling basins, and the mortified anxiety of the owners of the still empty ones? How tell of the magnificent, if somewhat ostentatious, liberality of the portly Mr M-, as his interpreter, the local butcher, announced, amid deafening cheers, that he was about to give £20 to the Lord out of his deep compassion for the suffering and oppressed? If the bolotu was a pious orgy, the fakamisonali was a religious debauch. In front of the pulpit stood a table on which lay a common wash-hand basin and an account-book, guarded each by a native teacher. The patrons of the basins sat in a stiff row behind.

After the preliminary religious exercises the missionary announced the name of the patron of the "plate" first to be filled. It might be the name of the person in charge of it, or that of some dead or absent one to whose memory it was dedicated. In one case a young blood of Vavau called his plate after a favourite dog, deceased some months before; but the presiding missionary had to draw the line somewhere, and he elected to draw it at dead dogs, because he feared that it might import a spirit of levity into the page 188proceedings. As the name of each patron was called she rose in a stately manner and cast her contribution into the basin as a nest-egg. And now those who had promised contributions to the "plate" just announced, swaggered up the aisle and flung their coins into the basin. It was amusing to note the difference of gesture. Here a man would march up with an air of deep disdain and toss his

"Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth."

coins into the basin one by one. Another would approach with proud humility and dash down a handful of threepenny pieces with a crash, retiring as he had come amid the shouts of well-merited applause for the dramatic contrast between his bearing and his bounty. In earlier days, before the glare of publicity had checked the spontaneity of the fakamisonali, the real sensation, as in all well-page 189arranged spectacles, was kept until the end. A band of men and women would come up together and walk round and round the basin, each throwing in a threepenny piece as he passed. After a few rounds a man whose stock of coins was exhausted would fall out, and the procession continued without him. Then only two were left to circle round each other in a sort of dance, amid deafening applause. At last one of the survivors gave out, and the victor was left alone to stand before the basin and chuck in his coins from a distance. He was the hero of the day.

Behind the pulpit were the tables of the money-changer, who, so far from being driven out of this temple, was considered necessary to its very existence, being, in fact, the missionary himself. The mode of collection demanded a larger stock of small coins than was obtainable at the local stores, and as every contributor was encouraged to enlighten his right hand as to the doings of his left, the smaller coins are made to do double duty. When the congregation would no longer respond to the taunts or the entreaties of the basin-man, the contents of the basin were counted and dumped upon the money-changer's table, thus supplying him with change to satisfy the requirements of the contributors whose turns were yet to come.

In the palmy days of the Wesleyan mission, when Mr Baker was still the trusted shepherd of an undivided flock, the mission treasury was filled by a system for the ingenuity of which I believe he deserves the entire credit. In the hysterical enthusiasm so cleverly fostered by the missionaries, the natives were quite ready to mortgage their crops for the brief glory of surpassing their neigh-page 190bours; but it was thought that if the missionaries themselves advanced the money and afterwards sued their debtors in the courts when the excitement of the collection had had time to cool down, adverse criticism, and perhaps even the resentment of the faithful, might be aroused. So Mr Baker entered into an unholy alliance with Messrs Huge & Co., a German firm newly arrived in the group. The agents of the firm were to advance cash to any native who wanted it for the church collections on promissory notes, to be repaid in copra when the crop was ripe; and as the firm had not sufficient coin to satisfy all comers, the mission was to hand back the coin to the agents as fast as it was collected, taking bills on Sydney in exchange. Thus the firm secured a lien on all the future crop, to the exclusion of its rivals, the mission trebled its collections, and when the bills became due, it was the German firm who incurred the obloquy of haling the over-generous debtor before the court, and of selling up his live stock and furniture. The complacency of the courts might be counted on, for the chairman of the mission was also the unofficial adviser of the Government. Strange stories of the fakamisonali of those days were told to the Commission of Enquiry sent to investigate Mr Baker's proceedings—how, when the trading agent at the church door dared not advance any more cash, the disappointed native would rush back to the basin, stripping off his coat as he ran, and fling it in to win one more yell of applause from his excited fellow-worshippers.

These more picturesque incidents have now given place to sober business. When the basins had drained the congregation of all their cash, the contents were quickly page 191counted and the amount whispered to the presiding teacher. In crying aloud the contents of each basin he allowed pauses for the cheering, and artistically kept the largest until the last. Mr M-, the deliverer of the oppressed, showed a fine eye for effect. He cared noth-

"To win one more yell of applause."

ing for the cheap and ephemeral burst of admiration that might have been won by flinging his twenty sovereigns into the same basin at once, but sat proudly erect while his almoner, the butcher, distributed his munificence equally between all the six basins, thereby winning to page 192his interests the hearts of all the patrons and their friends. After the benediction had been pronounced, the congregation walked thoughtfully home to cool down and face the future.

It is easy to sneer at the missionaries in the South Pacific as drones sucking the honey that others have stored; as ministers of the collection-plate rather than of the Gospel; as moral teachers whose grim code is responsible for the deterioration of native morality. The books written about the Pacific Islands have been the work of either missionaries or passing travellers, and hostile criticism by the latter has been in obedience to the natural law of reaction after the sometimes nauseous series of self-laudatory books given to the world by the missionaries themselves. Casual travellers, who hoped to see the natives in their primitive simplicity of manners, are disappointed to find them clad and in their right minds, and galled at the restrictions, apparently arbitrary and unreasonable, laid upon them by their spiritual guides. They have read much of the hardships of the missionary's life. They find him sleek and prosperous, the autocrat of his flock, living in a good house, travelling in a comfortable and well-found boat: they feel that an attempt has been made to obtain their sympathies under false pretences, and they write down mission enterprise a fraud, and the system a mere institution for raising money from the gullible native. In this extreme view they are supported by the Europeans of the place,—for traders do not love missionaries, regarding them as competitors who, besides crippling trade, interfere with their domestic arrangements.

They are wrong, of course. It may be true that, with a few brilliant exceptions, the missionaries are men of but slight education and extreme narrowness of views, and that the time for hardship and danger has passed away; but one need only compare the past with the present to acknowledge how great is the work they have accomplished. The early missionaries went with their lives in their hands, having nothing to gain from their enterprise but the inward reward of self-sacrifice. As for the women who followed their husbands to suffer with them the privations they were less able to endure, forced to bear and rear children in unhealthy climates, shocked almost daily by scenes that disgust us even to read about, and relieved at last only to return to their fellows with shattered health, —no praise can be too great for them. If the first missionaries were ignorant and narrow-minded, so also, according to modern lights, have the apostles seemed, but no less in their case than in that of their great prototypes was their very narrowness of vision a means of success. Natives, like children, do not understand half-measures. If their gods were false gods, then was every custom connected with their worship, whether mutilations of the body, or ornaments, or dances, or ceremonies, fit only for the most rigid prohibition. To gain an ascendancy over them, something more was wanted than the mere ingrafting of a new belief upon their lives. Their own creeds were hedged about with tabus, each enforced by the fear of death, and a religion without such prohibitions could not long hold their respect. So, from no calculating wisdom, they took unconsciously the wisest course and made their new code as uncompromising as that they were displacing.

But now that the missionaries are only called upon to carry on the work founded by their predecessors, and know nothing of the danger their predecessors had to encounter, it is not astonishing that, among men recruited from a lower stratum of society and education, there should be some whose behaviour has detracted from the credit of the Missionary Society, and that these have been

A Tongan Shoolgirl.

taken by hostile critics as types of the body of which they are members. The two main charges brought against the missionaries of to-day are that they give a first place to the collection of money, and that they have introduced and kept alive among the natives the unedifying spectacle of warring Churches. To the first charge it may be answered that no Church ever was or ever will be carried on without funds, and it is surely to the credit of a mission that they should have induced the people whom they benefit to support their Church and schools instead of leaving them to make appeals to philanthropists for funds to carry on their work. For the missions are not concerned only with the spiritual needs of the natives—they also do the great practical work of maintaining day schools in every village. The missionaries themselves page 195would not deny that there have been grave abuses in the means adopted for obtaining subscriptions; but these abuses have not been general, and they have been due to the fact that among the missionaries, as among every considerable body of men, there have been a few who were unworthy of the cause in which they were employed. The second charge is unfortunately true.

I shall not speak of the Church of England Mission working in Melanesia, of the Presbyterian Mission of the New Hebrides, nor of the London Mission of Raratonga, Samoa, and New Guinea, for none of those Societies are concerned with Tonga; but I shall confine myself to a review of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission of Australasia and the Roman Catholic Mission of the Société de Marie.

The Wesleyans sent their first missionary to Tonga in June 1822, and after three years' interruption they began work in earnest in 1826. There were two years of doubt and difficulty, three of slow but certain advance, and then they found themselves successful beyond their wildest hopes. With the conversion of King Josiah Aleamotu and of Taufaahau their cause was assured. The people followed their hereditary chiefs, and the heathen party became an ever-dwindling minority. Haapai and Vavau were Christian to a man: two-thirds of Tongatabu had embraced the new religion. Yet in the year 1835 we find this minority so hostile to Christianity that they are prepared to fight rather than accept it. In 1837 they are actually embarked in the hopeless struggle against an overwhelming majority. In 1840 they have driven back their assailants, even when supported by an English ship-of-war, and the hated missionaries are in flight. Yet there page 196was no advance on their side, no plundering nor laying waste after the manner of the cruel savages the missionaries represent them to be. With the discomfiture of their aggressors they seem to ask only for peace.

The story of these events, as told by the missionary historians, lacks cohesion. The finger of Providence, it is true, is pointed in every page. We are invited to shudder at the dark-mindedness of the heathen who reject the proffered salvation; to thrill at the virtue of the Christian troops fighting in a holy crusade; to feel a glow of triumph as we read of the fall of each heathen town; to pity the peace-loving missionaries forced into war's alarms, but enduring all things for compassion of their erring flock; and yet, when we have read it all, there is a sense of something kept back. Missionary records are unfortunately never remarkable for lucidity. They were not penned for the eye of an unsympathetic public, nor should we expect them to be impartial histories of public events. They were written with a purpose, by men who viewed all things by the light of their appointed task; who classed all events, all native customs and ceremonies, as helping or retarding "the work"; who revelled in iconoclasm, destroying recklessly with that narrowness of vision which is the characteristic of all human evan-gelists; who saw divine interposition in the most trivial occurrences of their lives. To advance their cause money was necessary, and to win money from a cold and indifferent public, compassion for their hardships and sympathy with their self-sacrifice had to be aroused. It is an ungrateful and even a dangerous task to read between the lines of these records; yet, since they are our only page 197published sources of information, I may be acquitted of a wish to detract from a really great work if I submit them to the tests from which even sacred history is no longer exempt.

The principal facts, as related by the missionaries, are these. With the conversion of the higher chiefs Christianity spread with a rapidity that proved the direct interposition of Providence. Five years later there remained but a minority inspired by the evil one to resist the truth. Not content to remain heathen, they took up arms in the cause of Antichrist, and even made their religious differences an excuse to rebel against the civil authority of their king. Two reasons are assigned for their hostility: they "set themselves to the task of up-rooting Christianity," and "they were an army of rebels, fighting against their earthly and their heavenly sovereign." A more grievous thing followed: they received into their midst the "emissaries of Rome," and their last state was worse than the first. The mission party fought, we are repeatedly assured, not as Christians against heathen, but as soldiers of the State against rebels; and the missionaries visited the besiegers morning and evening to give them the consolations of religion, while the French "Jack priests," as the Rev. Mr Yonge is pleased to call his fellow-workers, stayed within the walls of the fort, and encouraged the heathen in their seditious resistance to lawful authority.

Several questions occur to the reader of this narrative. If the war was really a mere civil disturbance, it is strange that the line of cleavage between loyalists and rebels should have been the same as that which separated the page 198Christians from the heathen. If the heathen were the aggressors, why do we always find them in the position of besieged rather than of besiegers? If, on the other hand, they were simply fighting for liberty to dissent from the majority, they can scarcely have been the aggressors; and indeed for persons fighting "for the express purpose of destroying their king, whom they hated on account of his religion, and of slaughtering all his Christian subjects," they showed a singular neglect of their own interests, for they allowed King Aleamotu to return to his friends after he had voluntarily placed himself within their power. With questions such as these to solve, the reader feels that if he accepts the statement that the civil war in Tonga was the work of the "great enemy of God and man," he must also admit that, with diabolical cunning, the devil chose the pious missionaries as his instruments for producing strife.

If the missionaries succeeded in blinding themselves regarding the origin of these wars, they did not deceive the natives. In October 1893 it was my good fortune to find Akesa, the daughter of Lavaka, chief of Bea, still living in Fiji as a pensioner-servant of a mission family, —bright-eyed and intelligent for all her seventy years. From her relationship to the chief of the heathen party, she had been selected by King George to carry messages to and from the enemy, and had been present both at the death of Captain Croker and the fall of Bea. She began her narrative with the words, "You must know that there were three wars to make the heathen turn to Christianity."

Besides the missionaries there was but one writer who was an eye-witness of the disturbances of 1840. Com-page 199modore Wilkes of the United States navy, after vainly endeavouring to mediate between the two belligerent parties, did not hesitate to lay some of the blame of the war at the door of the missionaries, thereby calling down upon himself a torrent of vituperation from their apologists. He hints that they had it within their power to avert the bloodshed by consenting to allow the heathen freedom of choice, but that they would listen to no terms but the enforced conversion of the enemy to Christianity. Whether they were or were not to blame, the war of 1840 did not leave them scatheless. When H.M.S. Favourite left the island after the disaster at Bea, we are told that the surviving officers "took with them the two missionaries, Messrs Tucker and Rabone, with their families." Commodore Wilkes is more explicit. He says that the Christian party, the aggressors, were put to flight, and that the missionaries hastened away from the storm they had provoked and were powerless to allay.

The missionaries have accused Wilkes of a bias against them, and of "a strange prejudice in favour of man in his savage state": it is therefore fair to compare the statement of an observer who was confessedly an admirer of the great results they had accomplished. Commodore Erskine, who visited the group in 1853, writes:—

I am indeed bound in justice to remark that in respect of their treatment of the people here [in Haapai] and in Vavau, the gentlemen of this mission do not compare favourably with those of the London Society in the Samoan islands. A more dictatorial spirit towards the chiefs and people seemed to show itself; and one of the missionaries in my presence sharply reproved Vuke, a man of high rank in his own country, for page 200presuming to speak to him in a standing posture, —a breach of discipline for which, if reprehensible, I was probable answerable, having encouraged the chief on all occasions to put himself on an equal footing with myself and the other officers. The missionaries seemed also to live much more apart from the natives than in Samoa, where free access is allowed to them at all times. Here, on the contrary, the gates of the enclosures were not merely kept closed, but sometimes locked,—a precaution against intrusion which, although perhaps warranted in some degree by the custom of fencing their grounds, and by the greater propensity on the part of these people to theft, I never saw adopted elsewhere, and which must operate unfavourably to that freedom of intercourse so necessary to the establishment of perfect confidence between the pastors and their flock.

If the missionaries were overbearing to the chiefs even at that early date, a light is thrown upon the curious persistence with which some of them clung to paganism. The ancient beliefs of the Polynesians never formed a system of religion, and, to compare small things with great, as the way was already smoothed for Christianity by the growing scepticism of the Roman empire, so were the minds of the Tongan chiefs ripe to seize upon any religious creed with a more logical foundation than the worn-out mummeries of their own ancestor-worship. Perhaps the ancient priestcraft, with its exactions of votive offerings and its hysterical oracles, would have shared the fate of its forgotten predecessor, phallus-worship, had the priests been less politic and tactful. But they knew that the existence of their order depended upon the union of Church and State; and their oracular utterances, plastic as those of Delphi, were directed always to upholding the privileges of the chiefs. Between the two orders there page 201was a thorough understanding. The chief saw that the regular offerings to the spirits were not stinted; the priest, possessed by his god, retained sufficient self-command to gasp prophecies in remarkable accordance with the chief's interest. That they, like the Augurs, could meet without grinning, was doubtless due to the grim reality of the risk that often attached to the sacerdotal office; for was not the priest of Tubou Totai already doomed to be strangled for failing to restore Finau's daughter, when sudden death overtook his patron? Even seventeen years before the arrival of the first missionaries, the chiefs did not care to conceal their scepticism; and perhaps, if the tragic death of Finau had not seemed so signal a revenge of the outraged gods, the missionaries would have found that the ancient faith had crumbled away of itself before their arrival.

combs.

The influence of the priests had been so slight that, even with the fear of seeing their occupation gone, they could oppose no obstacle to the new creed. They are scarcely mentioned even by missionaries. The opposition came from the chiefs them-page 202selves, inspired thereto, not as the good missionaries tell us, by the "great enemy of God and man," but by what has since proved to be a well-grounded alarm for the safety of their order. Some of them were shrewd enough to see in the new creed a political system that struck directly at their privileges. In Tonga, as in Galilee and in Rome, the first Christian convert was a commoner. The chiefs, who held that their inferiors possessed no souls, learned with dismay that in the sight of the missionaries all men, not ministers of the Gospel, are equal; that one law was to bind the chief and his serf alike-that the proudest aristocracy in the world were to be abased to the level of the meanest plebeian. Their real stumbling-block was the socialism of Christianity; for the Tongan chiefs having, like Nicodemus, great possessions, were not masters of the higher Biblical criticism that has adapted the creed to the social inequalities that clash with its teachings. To them the new system seemed to strike directly at the privileges of their order. Their power rested upon superstition, hardened and cemented by long custom, and to admit mere foreigners to superior authority was to lower them in the eyes of their subjects. They did not resist the new teachers, they simply claimed the liberty to dissent from the majority,—a liberty which of all others men are least willing to grant to one another.

Missionaries are by the nature of their calling intolerant. Tolerance in an evangelist is a sign that he is unfit for his mission. If Messrs Rabone and Tucker had been the men to discourage their new converts from coercing the heathen, they would not have achieved their page 203remarkable success. Expecting hardships, disappointments, and possibly martyrdom, they suddenly found themselves the most powerful persons in the country. Whatever measure of influence the chiefs possessed, that they were able to exert for the furtherance of their cause; and, as the unrealised possibilities of their position were borne in upon them, they gave God the praise, and began to make their power felt on their own account. The chiefs whose favour they had courted were now to discover that these foreigners, who had so meekly sought their protection, were, as the vicars on earth of a great and terrible Otua, to assume their rightful position of superiority. Henceforth the chiefs must pay to them the deference they had themselves received from their inferiors. Small wonder that, to those who still hesitated, this new portent of the secular power of the priesthood, never admitted under their heathen system, became so insurmountable a difficulty that they chose rather to cleave to their heathen gods and their independence.

It is easy to blame the missionaries after the event, to point to the lessons of history by which they might have been guided, and to forget that if they had been of that cool and calculating temper that is capable of founding a policy upon the teachings of history, they would never have come to Tonga. These men were not members of an Order trained to obey the direction of a central authority; they were homely men of slight attainments, burning with a zeal that drove out all considerations of policy and caution.