new god was added to
the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular.
Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the
ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to
island; they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes,
sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and
were the artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group.
Their life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the
highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood
next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of
policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a
mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of
conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its
members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave
offspring--I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the
design seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful
remedy repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these
trappings of mystery, pleasure, and parade. This is the more probable,
and the secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more
plainly, if it be true, that after a certain period of life, the
obligation of the votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate;
afterwards, expected to be chaste.

Here, then, we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men,
child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle,
invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan
salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers,
the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal
tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding
and alarm. And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in
the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter
Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. Why this change? Or,
grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the
introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation,
why is that depopulation not universal? The population of Tahiti, after
a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a
similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight
increase is to be observed; and the Samoans ar