LAWYERS IN FIJI.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 544, 16 March 1876, Page 3

LAWYERS IN FIJI.

Many interesting experiments are being tried in Fiji, and not the least of them is an I attempt to dispense with lawyers. A land ! court has been established there, to investigate all titles, and one of its rules is that the parties to the suits shall conduct their own cases. Solicitor and barrister are alike forbidden so much as to enter the precincts of the building, and in order to effectually exclude them, the provision is published that none but the parties to the suits shall be present. In justification of this course the Fiji Argus mentions that not long ago a suit about a bit of land in Levuka, worth only a few pounds, involved costs to the amount of £657 17s Sd. The odd £7 17 Bcl might have purchased the property, the balance represents the luxury of law. As all titles _in Fiji have to undergo this investigation before the Government will recognise that the land has been fairly obtained from the natives, it might be thought that the effort at economy and reform would be popular; but such a supposition would be in ignorance of human nature and of British "feeling. There is a great outcry in the isles of the Pacific. The lawyers deplore the loss of their clients with an exceeding bitterness, but their grief seems nothing in comparison with the woes of the the would-be clients, who are separated from their advisers. It is the same everywhere. Lawyers are an abused class, but the happiest hours of a man's life— the man who has an injury on hand —is when he rushes oil to his solicitor, and the cry for cheap law is often only a complaint that the article boing so dear, people cannot afford to indulge in the luxury. Fiji is a Crown colony of a " severe type," but the Government may yet be driven to yield to public opinion, and with the lawyers once more flourishing, the country will rejoice. The suitors save much money at present, but they lose their temper; they have heavy purses, but heavier hearts.

PORTLY NEW ZEALAND ABSENTEES.

(Home Correspondent Auckland Star.) I almost wonder that you stay-at-home New Zealand colonists do not raise the cry of absenteeism as they do in Ireland and clap a good round swingeing tax on all those unpatriotic and wealthy folk who draw their revenues out of your hardly won earnings and spend them in England. At the present time I cannot walk through the city without jostling some ponderous, portly, and por-tentious-looking worthy—always when the weather will permit in a white waistcoat—who, I am fully aware, is receiving many hundreds a year from his properties in New Zealand, but who does not pay a single copper towards the revenue of that colony. Is this right ? The difficulties in the way of imposing a property tax in New Zealand are enormous, and, indeed, so long as that ridiculous monstrosity, the Legislative Council, remains in existence, it will be next door to impossible to impose any tax of such a kind. But the injustice to those who reside in the colony is so obvious as scarcely to need demonstration. The Irish cry out against absentee landlords because they spend their incomes elsewhere than on their own estates, but then these absentees have to pay heavy taxes and rates, the latter for the relief of the poor of the land, whilst you have a double grievance, for you don't get the benefit either of expenditure, or taxes. In many respects a skilled workman is better off here than with you. Here he pays no taxes whatever, whilst in New Zealand everything he touches is taxed to death. The rich pay an immense proportion of the taxes in this - country, but the only class with ground for complaint are clerks and small professional men, who with a certain small income and an appearance to keep up, pay severe imposts from which the miner and the skilled mechanic with quite as good incomes, escape scot free.