46o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Tahiti and the natives would be deprived of their lands and reduced to 

 slaver}^ as were the Indians of the West Indies. The opposition of the 

 chiefs was of so determined a nature that the missionaries deemed it 

 advisable to desist, from their attempt, and their effort to introduce a 

 cotton-cloth mill met with similar discouragement. 



Indeed, it is doubtful whether the child-like natives would have been 

 either happier or better as mill hands laboring eight or ten hours a day 

 in distilleries or factories than they were each in his own house beneath 

 the palm groves and depending upon the rich bounty of the land and 

 sea for food and clothing. These European autocrats sought in all re- 

 forms to begin at the top, and had they displayed the good judgment to 

 teach merely the rudiments of religion, government and agriculture, and 

 to encourage and develop a market for the crafts the natives already 

 practised, they would probably not have felt obliged to complain to 

 Admiral Wilkes that "sincere piety was rarely to be found among the 

 natives." 



In 1821 a rebellious return to idolatry broke out among the young 

 and aristocratic element, and after this was sternly suppressed a fanat- 

 ical sect, the Mamaia, arose in 1828, their leader claiming to be Christ 

 and promising a sensual paradise to his followers. The natives who at 

 first had expected miracles from the white man's god, were, now begin- 

 ning to lose faith and interest and to loathe the dull life tkeir masters 

 forced upon them, and in 1839, when Admiral Wilkes visited Tahiti he 

 was surprised to find the attendance upon worship on Sunday to be 

 small, less than 200 being present in the church, and most of these 

 being women who "did not appear to be as attentive as they had been 

 represented.'' These women, he says, 



were dressed in a most unbecoming manner in high flaring chip bonnets of their 

 own manufacture, loose gray flowing silk frocks, with showy kerchiefs tied 

 around their necks. 



The time has come when the natives of Polynesia are beginning to 

 appeal for freedom to govern and maintain their own churches and 

 under ministers of their own race; to suffer from their own mistakes 

 and win their own achievements. 



Yet a great task still remains to the European co-worker for their 

 enlightenment, for everywhere there is a crying need for manual train- 

 ing and technical schools patterned upon the general plan of Booker 

 Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Above all, markets must be sought 

 and developed for the wares and produce of the natives, for most of their 

 ^present apathy is due to the fact that they can obtain no adequate re- 

 muneration of the products of their labor, but are, in effect, penalized 

 for their very industry through the rapacious acts of traders. 



Moreover, the present rule of the religious autocrat, essentially altru- 

 istic and high minded as it is, has produced only obedient or servile 



