add that to vice and misery as
checks of nature to an increase of humans faster than the means of
subsistence. Nor have most Christian or civilized nations made such
a check effectual.

The ever-dominant and only inherent impulse in all living beings,
including man, is the will to remain alive--the will, that is, to
attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.

All schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to put into
permanent codes the expedients found useful by some given race in
the course of its successful endeavors to remain alive.

Did not Zarathustra so philosophize, and is not the national trend
in Europe exalting his theory? With the difference that nationalism
takes the place of individualism in the scheme of survival and a
better place in the sun is the legend on the banners.

Unable to find enemies to keep their numbers down, exempt from the
epidemics and endemics of Europe and Asia, unacquainted with the
contraceptives known until recently only by our rich, but now preached
by organized societies to the humblest, the Tahitian, Marquesan,
and Hawaiian came to consider the blotting out of lives just begun
worthy deeds.

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian," was our own cynical Western
maxim when life and opportunity to lay by for the future meant
ceaseless struggle with the dispossessed.

We, in situations of dire necessity, eat our own fellows. We have done
it at sea and on land. We eat their flesh when shipwreck or isolation
urges survival. We let children die by the myriad for lack of proper
care and sustenance, and kill them in factories and tenements to
gain luxuries for ourselves. One justification for slavery was that
it gave leisure for culture to the slave-owners, and that Southern
chivalry and the charm of Southern womanhood outweighed the fettered
black bodies and souls in the scale of achievement.

The Tahitian did the best he could, and the Arioi set the example in
a total observance not to be demanded or expected of the mass. It is
related that if the child cried before destruction, it was spared,
for they had not the heart to kill it. If Arioi, the parents must
have given it away or otherwise avoided the opprobrium.

Another explanation of the bloody oath of the Arioi might be found
in an effort of the princes of Tahiti to prevent in this manner the
excessive growth of the Arii, or noble caste. The Arioi society
was founded by princes and led by