entertain the Arioi. These had many devices
to overcome such obstacles. They would surround a child and pretend
to raise him to kingly rank, and then demand from his parents suitable
presents for such a distinction.

At death there were rites for the Arioi apart from those for
others. They paid the priest of Romotane, who kept the key of
their paradise, to admit the decedent to Rohutu noa-noa in the reva
or clouds above the mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of
Raiatea. The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees demanded by
the priest, and had to be satisfied with a denial of this Mussulman
Eden reserved for the festive and devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary
people perforce abstain from intoxicants in America while the rich
drink their fill. The historian Lecky says:

It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian Fathers that concupiscence,
or the sensual passion, was the "original sin" of human nature; and
it must be owned that the progress of knowledge, which is usually
extremely opposed to the ascetic theory of life, concurs with the
theological view, in showing the natural force of this appetite to
be far greater than the well-being of man requires. The writings of
Malthus have proved, what the Greek moralists appear in a considerable
degree to have seen, that its normal and temperate exercise would
produce, if universal, the utmost calamities to the world, and that,
while nature seems, in the most unequivocal manner, to urge the
human race to early marriages, the first condition of an advancing
civilization is to restrain or diminish them.

Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all Polynesia,
the girls have their fling at promiscuity from puberty to the late
teens or early twenties, when an immense and increasing population
compelled the thinking men to devise a remedy for the starvation which
in times of drought or comparative failure of the feis or breadfruit
or a scarcity of fish menaced the nation! That the cruel remedy of
infanticide was chosen may be laid to ignorance of foeticidal methods,
and the indisposition of the languorous women to suffer pain or to
risk their own lives or health.

Lecky says that however much moralists may enforce the obligation
of extra-matrimonial purity, this obligation has never been even
approximately regarded. One could hardly expect from the heathen
Tahitians moral restraint. Malthus, a Christian clergyman, did not
until the second edition of his book