These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular cause,or even from many in a single group.I have in my eye an able and amiable pamphlet by the Rev.S.E.Bishop:'Why are the Hawaiians Dying Out?'Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract,which contains real information;and yet Mr.Bishop's views would have been changed by an acquaintance with other groups.Samoa is,for the moment,the main and the most instructive exception to the rule.The people are the most chaste and one of the most temperate of island peoples.They have never been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence.Their clothing has scarce been tampered with;at the ****** and becoming tabard of the girls,Tartuffe,in many another island,would have cried out;for the cool,healthy,and modest lava-lava or kilt,Tartuffe has managed in many another island to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers.Lastly,and perhaps chiefly,so far from their amusements having been curtailed,I think they have been,upon the whole,extended.The Polynesian falls easily into despondency:bereavement,disappointment,the fear of novel visitations,the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures,easily incline him to be sad;and sadness detaches him from life.The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life are striking;and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas.In Samoa,on the other hand,perpetual song and dance,perpetual games,journeys,and pleasures,make an animated and a smiling picture of the island life.And the Samoans are to-day the gayest and the best entertained inhabitants of our planet.The importance of this can scarcely be exaggerated.In a climate and upon a soil where a livelihood can be had for the stooping,entertainment is a prime necessity.It is otherwise with us,where life presents us with a daily problem,and there is a serious interest,and some of the heat of conflict,in the mere continuing to be.So,in certain atolls,where there is no great gaiety,but man must bestir himself with some vigour for his daily bread,public health and the population are maintained;but in the lotos islands,with the decay of pleasures,life itself decays.It is from this point of view that we may instance,among other causes of depression,the decay of war.We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary business of war on the great scale,trailing epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses in its train,that we have almost forgotten its original,the most healthful,if not the most humane,of all field sports -hedge-warfare.From this,as well as from the rest of his amusements and interests,the islander,upon a hundred islands,has been recently cut off.And to this,as well as to so many others,the Samoan still makes good a special title.
Upon the whole,the problem seems to me to stand thus:-Where there have been fewest changes,important or unimportant,salutary or hurtful,there the race survives.Where there have been most,important or unimportant,salutary or hurtful,there it perishes.
Each change,however small,augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has to become inured.There may seem,A PRIORI,no comparison between the change from 'sour toddy'to bad gin,and that from the island kilt to a pair of European trousers.Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other;and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks.We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary.
In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent authority;the king becomes his MAIREDUPALAIS;he can proscribe,he can command;and the temptation is ever towards too much.Thus (by all accounts)the Catholics in Mangareva,and thus (to my own knowledge)the Protestants in Hawaii,have rendered life in a more or less degree unliveable to their converts.And the mild,uncomplaining creatures (like children in a prison)yawn and await death.It is easy to blame the missionary.But it is his business to make changes.It is surely his business,for example,to prevent war;and yet I have instanced war itself as one of the elements of health.On the other hand,it were,perhaps,easy for the missionary to proceed more gently,and to regard every change as an affair of weight.I take the average missionary;I am sure Ido him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate to bombard a village,even in order to convert an archipelago.
Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands)that change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.
There is one point,ere I have done,where I may go to meet criticism.I have said nothing of faulty hygiene,bathing during fevers,mistaken treatment of children,native doctoring,or abortion -all causes frequently adduced.And I have said nothing of them because they are conditions common to both epochs,and even more efficient in the past than in the present.Was it not the same with unchastity,it may be asked?Was not the Polynesian always unchaste?Doubtless he was so always:doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe.
Take the Hawaiian account of Cook:I have no doubt it is entirely fair.Take Krusenstern's candid,almost innocent,description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas;consider the disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself,where (in the war of lust)the American missionaries were once shelled by an English adventurer,and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American warship;add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas,and carry off a complement of women for the cruise;consider,besides,how the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods,as appears plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii;and again,in the story of the discovery of Tutuila,when the really decent women of Samoa prostituted themselves in public to the French;and bear in mind how it was the custom of the adventurers,and we may almost say the business of the missionaries,to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.
Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular;and the result,even in the most degraded islands,has been further degradation.
Mr.Lawes,the missionary of Savage Island,told me the standard of female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites.
In heathen time,if a girl gave birth to a bastard,her father or brother would dash the infant down the cliffs;and to-day the scandal would be small.Or take the Marquesas.Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection,the young were strictly guarded;they were not suffered so much as to look upon one another in the street,but passed (so my informant put it)like dogs;and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods,and lived there for a fortnight in promiscuous liberty.Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my authority,and declare themselves better informed.Ishould prefer the statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood alone,which it is far from doing)to the report of the most honest traveller.A ship of war comes to a haven,anchors,lands a party,receives and returns a visit,and the captain writes a chapter on the manners of the island.It is not considered what class is mostly seen.Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway,and the gentlemen who share with them their hire.Stanislao's opinion of a decay of virtue even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others;his very example,the progress of dissolution amongst the young,is adduced by Mr.Bishop in Hawaii.And so far as Marquesans are concerned,we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners.I do not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now obtain;I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count paternal kinship.It is not possible to give details;suffice it that their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and vicious children,and their debauches persevered in until energy,reason,and almost life itself are in abeyance.