d the commercialized conditions
accompanying the introduction among the Tahitians of European
standards, inventions, customs, and prohibitions. The institution was
of great age, without written chronicles, and, like all Polynesian
history, obscured by the superstitions bred of oral descent.

"The Arioi have been in Tahiti as long as the Tahitians," said the
old men to the first whites.

Of all the marvels of the South Seas unfolded by their discovery to
Europeans, and their scrutiny by adventurers and scientists, none seems
so striking and so provocative of curiosity as the finding in Tahiti
of a sect thoroughly communistic in character, with many elements of
refinement and genius, which obliterated the taboos against women, and
though nominally for the worship of the generative powers of nature,
mixed murder and minstrelsy in its rites and observance. For what wrote
red the records of this society in the journals of the discoverers,
missionaries, and early European dwellers in Tahiti, was the Arioi
primary plank of membership--that no member should permit his or her
child to live after birth. As at one time the Arioi society embraced
a fifth of the population, and had unbounded influence and power,
this stern rule of infanticide had to do with the depopulation of
the island, or, rather, the prevention of overpopulation. Yet while
the Arioi had existed as far back as their legends ran, Captain Cook,
as said Tetuanui, estimated the Tahitians to number seventy thousand
in 1769. The chronicles say that the bizarre order was rooted out
a hundred years ago. There are barely five thousand living of this
exquisite race, which the white had found without disease, happy,
and radiantly healthy. Evidently the Arioi had merely preserved a
supportable maximum of numbers, and it remained for civilization to
doom the entire people.

The Arioi fathers and mothers strangled their children or buried them
immediately after birth, for it was infamous to have them, and their
existence in an Arioi family would have created as much consternation
as in a Tibetan nunnery.

Infanticide in Tahiti and the surrounding islands was not confined
to the Arioi. The first three children of all couples were usually
destroyed, and twins were both killed. In the largest families more
than two or three children were seldom spared, and as they were a
prolific race, their not nursing the sacrificed innocents made for
more frequent births. Four, six, or ev