he rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted
on the _paepae_ of the laborers' cookhouse, making a fire of
cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit. Their savage
hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native
clings so passionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless
longing. No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled,
but Grelet's copra crop would profit first.

The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form
of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these
depopulated islands. Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even
a dollar failed to bring adequate relief. The Marquesan detests labor,
which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and
did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white
owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that
yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish
were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for
the government in payment for taxes.

The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races
everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with
the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the
Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor. They saw fortunes to be
made if they could but whip a multitude of backs to bending for them,
but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from
the native's point of view.

In America I often heard men who were out of employment,
particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue
the right to work. They could not enforce this alleged natural right,
and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in
this direction. But they were obliged to content themselves with the
thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other
easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.

Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the
employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra
forests, the kilns and boats. Thus, as in highly civilized countries
we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in
these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil.
But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they
would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.

An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part i