them, but that they sought to
break down the power of the nobles is evidenced by their admitting
virtually all castes to it, thus making it a privileged democracy,
in which birthrights had not the sway they had outside it, but in
which the chap who could fight and dance, sing, and tell good stories
might climb from lowly position to honor and popularity, and in which
a clever woman could make her mark.

The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi
may have exaggerated its baseness. In their unsophisticated minds,
unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them
sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic
pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much
consequence as morals, and vastly more important than health or
earthly happiness. They believed in diabolical possession, and were
prone to magnify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard
tasks. When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the bored natives were
sometimes scourged into church, and fines and imprisonment for lack of
devotion were imposed by the native courts. Often self-sacrificing,
the missionaries felt it was for the natives' eternal walfare, and
that souls might be saved even by compulsion. The Arioi society melted
under a changed control and Christian precepts.

Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making few converts,
but giving his life to noble effort, meditated often upon the success
of the missionaries in the South Seas--a success perhaps magnified
by the society which financed and cheered the restless men whom it
sent to Tahiti. Livingstone in his darker moments, consoling himself
with the accounts of these achievements in the missionary annals,
doubted his own efficacy against the deep depravity and heathenism of
his black flock. The fact unknown to him was that the missionaries in
Polynesia preached and prayed, doctored and taught, ten years before
they made a single convert. It was not until they bagged the king
that a pawn was taken by the whites from the adversaries' stubborn
game. The genius of these strugglers against an apparent impregnable
seat of wickedness was patience, "the passion of great hearts."

But conquering once politically, the missionaries found their task all
but too easy to suit militant Christians. As the converted drunkard
and burglar at a slum pentecost pour out their stories of weakness and
crime, so these Arioi, glorying in the