Thakombau died and a small pension was assigned to his heirs. The government of the islands was entrusted to Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead), the Governor of New South Wales. During the first year of its annexation to England Fiji was without a government of its own, but Sir Hercules Robinson appointed an administrator. On taking the islands in hand the English government had a hard task to solve in fulfilling all that was expected of it.
In the first place, the natives expected the abolition of the hateful poll-tax; the white colonists (who were partly American) either regarded the British rule distrustfully or (the British section) expected from it all kinds of benefits, for instance, the recognition of their dominion over the natives and the legalization of their claims to land they had seized, and so forth. The English government, however, proved competent to deal with the problem, and its first act was to abolish for ever the poll-tax which occasioned the enslavement of the natives for the profit of a few colonists. But here Sir Hercules Robinson was confronted by a serious dilemma. It was necessary to annul the poll-tax to escape from which the Fijians had appealed to the British government, but at the same time, by the rules of English colonial policy, the colony had to pay its own way, that is to say, had to find means to meet the expenses of its administration.
Yet with the abolition of the poll-tax the whole income of Fiji (from the customs dues) did not exceed £6,000, whereas the expenses of the administration demanded at least £70,000 a year. So Robinson, having abolished the money tax, devised a labour tax, that is, imposed obligatory labour on the Fijians, but this did not bring in the £70,000 required for his Own and his assistants’ maintenance. And matters did not progress till the appointment of a new Governor, Sir A. M. Gordon (Baron Stanmore), who, to obtain from the inhabitants the money needed for his own and his assistants’ support, devised the plan of not demanding money until there should be enough of it in circulation on the islands, but of collecting produce from the natives and selling it himself.
This tragic episode in the life of the Fijians is the clearest and best indication of what money is and of its significance. Here all is expressed: the first basis of slavery-cannon, threats, murder, the seizure of land, and also the chief instrument-money, which replaces all other means. What has to be followed through the course of centuries in an historic sketch of the economic development of nations, is here, when the various forms of monetary coercion have been fully developed, concentrated into a single decade. The drama begins with the American government sending ships with loaded cannon to the shores of the land, whore inhabitants it wishes to enslave.
The pretext for the threat is monetary, but the drama begins with cannon directed against all the inhabitants: women, children, the aged, and the innocent: an occurrence now being repeated in Africa, China, and Central Asia. That was the beginning of the drama: ‘Your money or your life,’ repeated in the history of all the conquests of all the nations; $45,000 and then $90,000, or a massacre. But there were no $90,000 available. The Americans had them. And then the second act of the drama begins: brief, bloody, terrible and concentrated slaughter has to be postponed, and changed for less noticeable, but more prolonged sufferings. And the tribe with its ruler seeks means to substitute monetary enslavement-slavery, for the massacre. It borrows money, and then the monetary forms of the enslavement of men are organized.
These forms at once begin to act like a disciplined army and within five years the whole work is done: the people are not only deprived of the right to use the land, and of their property, but also of their liberty; they are slaves.
The third act begins: the situation is too hard and the unfortunate people hear rumours that it is possible to exchange masters and go into slavery to someone else. (Of emancipation from the slavery imposed by money there is no longer any thought.) And the tribe calls in another master, to whom it submits with a request to mitigate its condition. The English come, see that the possession of these islands will make it possible for them to feed the drones of whom they have bred too many, and the English government annexes these islands with their inhabitants, but does not take them as chattel slaves and does not even take the land and distribute it to its own supporters.
Those old methods are now unnecessary. All that is necessary is that a tribute should be exacted; one large enough on the one hand to keep the slaves in slavery, and sufficient on the other to feed a multitude of drones.
The inhabitants had to pay £70,000 sterling. That is the fundamental condition on which England agreed to rescue the Fijians from their American slavery, and at the same time this was all that was necessary for the complete enslavement of the natives. But it turned out that under the conditions they were in the Fijians could not possibly pay £70,000. The demand was too great. The English modify the demand for a time, and take part of the claim in produce, in order, in due course, when money should be in circulation, to raise their exaction to its full amount.
England did not act like the former Company, whose procedure may be compared to the first arrival of savage conquerors among a savage people, when all they want is to seize what they can get and to go away again, but England acts as a far-seeing enslaver: it does not at once kill the hen that lays the golden egg, but will even feed it, knowing the hen to be a good layer. At first she slackens the reins for her own advantage, in order later to pull them in and reduce the Fijians to the state of monetary enslavement in which the European and civilized world finds itself, and from which no emancipation is in sight.
Money is a harmless medium of exchange, only not when at the shores of a country loaded cannon are directed against its inhabitants. As soon as money is forcibly exacted at the cannon’s mouth, then inevitably that is repeated which occurred on the Fiji Islands and has been repeated, and is repeated, everywhere and always: in the case of the old Princes of Russia and the Drevlyans, and with all governments and their subjects.
People who have the power to coerce others will do it by the forcible demand of such a quantity of money as will oblige the coerced to become the slaves of the coercers. And besides this, what happened in the case of the English and the Fijians always happens, namely that the coercers, in order to hasten the enslavement, will in their demands for money always exceed rather than understate the limit of what is needed for the purpose.
They will reach that limit without exceeding it only if a moral feeling is present, and even if that feeling does exist, they will always reach it when they are themselves in want. But governments will always exceed that limit, first because a government has no moral feelings, and secondly because, as we know, governments are themselves in extreme want, due to wars and to the need of paying their supporters. Governments are always irredeemably in debt and, even if they wished to, could not help following the rule expressed by a Russian statesman of the eighteenth century, that ‘one must shear the peasant and not let him get overgrown’.
All governments are irredeemably in debt, and this debt in its totality (apart from fortuitous diminutions in England and America) increases from year to year in a terrifying progression. Similarly do the budgets grow, that is the necessity of struggling with other aggressors and making payments of money and land to those who aid its own aggressions, and therefore the charges on land grown the same way.
Wages do not grow-not on account of the law of rent, but because there is an exaction by violence, of payments to the state and for the land, which has the purpose of taking from people all their surplus so that to satisfy this demand they must sell their labour: for the exploitation of that labour is the object of the imposition. of the taxes.
But the exploitation of that labour is only possible when, in the aggregate, more is demanded than the workers can pay without depriving themselves of nourishment. Raising the scale of wages would destroy the possibility of this slavery, and therefore, while there is violence, it never can be raised. And this simple and intelligible action of one set of men on another, economists have called the ‘iron law’ while the instrument by means of which this action is produced they call a ‘medium of exchange’.
Money-this harmless medium of exchange is needed by men in their mutual intercourse. But why has there never been, or could there be, money in its present-day significance where no forcible demand for money-taxes exists? And why has there always been, and always will be as there is among the Fijians, the Kirgiz, the Africans, the Phoenicians, and in general among people who do not pay taxes-either the direct exchange of things for things, or else the use of casual tokens of value, such as sheep, furs, skins, or shells?
