30 OCTOBER 1909, Page 24

is the second of these which gives it what it

has of value above the average. "Black-birding in the Pacific" is the title, and it is a remarkably vivid picture of life in one of its sinister aspects. " Black-birding "—the term is not as familiar now as it was twenty-five years ago—was the system of furnishing labour for the sugar plantations of Fiji, Queensland, Ire. Whatever may have been the beginning, it degenerated into a slave trade. Of course there were people found to defend it, as there are those who defend the management of the Congo Free State to-day, but before long it was universally condemned. And Mr. Sinclair tells an excellent story about it. The chase of the Rimac ' is very good; still more powerful is the final scene where the islanders offer an atonement for the murder of the missionaries,—innocent victims for the misdoin,gs of others. (It was the "black-birders" that rcally brought Bishop Patteaon to his death.) The first story has something to do with the same subject.