Note 128 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

The great significance of the appropriation of the land clearly appears, when we consider a phenomenon frequently occurring among savages: debt-slavery. Among some savage tribes there are rich and poor as well as in Polynesia; the poor, however, do not apply to the rich for employment, but are enslaved by them. Thus among the Tagals and Visayas, in the time of the conquista, most slaves had become such by being unable to pay debts they had contracted. If, in a time of famine, a poor man had been fed for some days by his rich neighbour, he became his slave. Sometimes the rich even placed a quantity of rice in some conspicuous place and lay on the look-out; if then a poor man came and ate of the rice, he was seized and enslaved128. Such a thing would never have happened in Polynesia, and the reason why is evident. Among the Tagals and Visayas the poor were able, in ordinary times, to provide for themselves they did not offer their services to the rich; the latter had to avail themselves of such an opportunity as a famine, to lay hands on them and compel them to work for them, not only during the famine, but afterwards when, if free, they would have been able to subsist independently of the rich. But in Polynesia the means of subsistence are permanently in the hands of the rich to the exclusion of the poor; therefore the rich need not compel the poor to work for them, for they are always at their mercy. Among the Tagals and Visayas the poor, though destitute of wealth, were not without resources: they had the free land always at their disposal; and it was only in extraordinary circumstances (e.g. when the harvest had failed) that they were temporarily dependent on the rich. In Polynesia the poor are destitute of land, and therefore permanently dependent on the landlords.