s found exemplified in the
two-child families of the nobles of France and Germany and the rich
of New England. Parents want to do more for children, and so have
fewer, and think proper contraception and even killing the foetus in
its early stages. Modern medicine has aided this. Many women in many
countries for ages have practised abortion in order not to spoil their
bodies by child-bearing. To-day the demands of fashion and of social
pleasures have caused large families to be considered even vulgar
among the extremists in the mode. Organizations incited by the new
feminism send heralds of contraception schemes on lecture tours to
instruct the proletariat, and brave women to go to prison for giving
the prescription. The well-to-do have always been cognizant of it.

The Tahitians have ever been adoring of little ones, and if
their annals are stained by the blood of innumerable innocents
murdered at birth, let it be remembered that it was a law, and not a
choice of parents--a law induced by the sternest demands of social
economy. Religion or the domination of priests commanded it. They
obeyed, as Abraham did when he began to whet his knife for his son
Isaac. To-day in Europe conditions prescribe conduct. Morality fades
before race demands. Polygamy or promiscuity looms a possibility,
and may yet have state and church sanction, as in Turkey.

In Tahiti, from time immemorial, as native annals went, there was
a wondrous set of men and women called Arioi who killed all their
children, and whose ways and pleasures recall the phallic worshipers of
ancient Asian days. Forgotten now, with accounts radically differing as
to its composition, its aims, and even its morals, a hundred romances
and fables woven about its personnel, and many curious hazards upon
its beginnings and secret purposes, the Arioi society constitutes
a singular mystery, still of intense interest to the student of the
cabalistic, though buried with these South Sea Greeks a century ago.

The Arioi, in its time of divertisement, was a lodge of strolling
players, musicians, poets, dancers, wrestlers, pantomimists, and
clowns, the merry men and women of the Pacific tropics. They were
the leaders in the worship of the gods, the makers and masters of the
taboo, and when war or other necessity called them from pleasure or
religion, the leaders in action and battle.

The ending of the celebrated order came about through the work of
English Christian missionaries an