[Pageheader: _LALA_ RECEIVES LEGAL SANCTION]
The Colonial government has been bitterly attacked by certain European critics for permitting _lala_ to exist at all. Insufficient knowledge of the subject has betrayed them into expressions as inaccurate as they are intemperate. "Slavery," and "Legalized Robbery," are not the strongest terms that have been applied to _lala_, and the people have been described as sunk in apathy and despair under the exactions of their chiefs. Let us see how far these charges are borne out by facts. The native regulations that defined the _lala_ also provided that--"If any town shall desire to commute its _lala_ work due to any chief for a fixed annual payment in money or in kind, and such chief shall have accepted such commutation with the Governor's sanction, the right of _lala_ cannot again be resumed by him. A record of all such commutations shall be kept in the Native Affairs Office." Although many native communities now receive large incomes from rents and surplus taxes, from which commutation could be paid, there has been no single instance of an application to commute the _lala_ during the thirty-one years in which the Regulation has been in force. If the people felt the _lala_ to be oppressive they would not have hesitated to tender the trifling annual payment that would free them from it. There is no doubt that the _lala_ has been pushed beyond its legitimate uses, but always by the chiefs of the confederations. Personal _lala_ cannot be legitimately applied without the reciprocal obligation of providing the workers with food (_vakaotho_), and when the chief neglects this obligation, or uses the _lala_ in the execution of work for Europeans, the _lala_ at once becomes, not legalized robbery, for it is illegal, but oppression. An instance of this occurred before annexation, when, as already related, the American Government had fined king Thakombau £9000 for the destruction of Vice-Consul Williams's house in a fire that was probably accidental. The people of the Tailevu coast were ordered to fish _bêche-de-mer_ for sale to Europeans in order to meet the American claim, but they refused, though they knew that refusal might cost them their lives. For Thakombau they would cheerfully have stripped themselves of all they had, but to collect produce destined for a foreigner was an infringement of the law of custom.