Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the
teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and
cannibalism. Among the Hawaiians--a hardier people, in a more exacting
climate--agriculture was carried far; the land was irrigated with
canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the number and diligence of
the old inhabitants. Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and
infanticide prevailed. On coral atolls, where the danger was most
plainly obvious, these were enforced by law and sanctioned by
punishment. On Vaitupu, in the Ellices, only two children were allowed
to a couple; on Nukufetau, but one. On the latter the punishment was by
fine; and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child
spared.

This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or so
long-suffering with children--children make the mirth and the adornment
of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries.
"Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them." The stray bastard
is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted
children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I
may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far
as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities
of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous
Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with
embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be
the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some eastern islands
to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far
from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In some, when his child was
born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a
drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being. And in some the
lightest words of children had the weight of oracles. Only the other
day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger,
I am assured the stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in
another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki
having taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted
the situation and loaded me with gifts.

With such sentiments the necessity for child destruction would not fail
to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the
Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a