future traveller.

Religion and political institutions may raise a nation in a short period
to a high point of civilization, and they may also serve, as in case of
the Turks, to retain them in perpetual barbarism. How will these mighty
powers operate on the Tahaitians? How can they, the qualifications of
their authors considered!

True, genuine Christianity, and a liberal government, might have soon
given to this people, endowed by nature with the seeds of every social
virtue, a rank among civilized nations. Under such a blessed influence,
the arts and sciences would soon have taken root, the intellect of the
people would have expanded, and a just estimation of all that is good,
beautiful, and eternally true, would have refined their manners and
ennobled their hearts. Europe would soon have admired, perhaps have
envied Tahaiti: but the religion taught by the Missionaries is not true
Christianity, though it may possibly comprehend some of its doctrines,
but half understood even by the teachers themselves. That it was
established by force, is of itself an evidence against its Christian
principle. A religion which consists in the eternal repetition of
prescribed prayers, which forbids every innocent pleasure, and cramps or
annihilates every mental power, is a libel on the Divine Founder of
Christianity, the benign Friend of human-kind. It is true, that the
religion of the Missionaries has, with a great deal of evil, effected
some good. It has abolished heathen superstitions, and an irrational
worship, but it has introduced new errors in their stead. It has
restrained the vices of theft and incontinence, but it has given birth
to bigotry, hypocrisy, and a hatred and contempt of all other modes of
faith, which was once foreign to the open and benevolent character of
the Tahaitian. It has put and end to avowed human sacrifices, but many
more human beings have been actually sacrificed to it, than ever were to
their heathen gods.

The elder Forster estimated, as we have already seen, the population of
Tahaiti at one hundred and thirty thousand souls. Allowing that he
over-calculated it, by even as much as fifty thousand, still eighty
thousand remained:--the present population amounts to only eight
thousand; so that nine-tenths must have disappeared. The diseases
introduced by the ardent spirits, the manufacture of Europe and America,
may, indeed, have much increased the mortality, but they are also known
in many islands in