A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



461 



children. Justice demands freedom for the Polynesian — room in which 

 to struggle and to rise. It is an inadequate defense of the present sys- 

 tem to say that it is immeasurably more humane than the savage rule of 

 the old chiefs, for it has proven itself incompetent to raise a single 

 native race into, a position of self-supporting independence. We have 

 given them the Bible, but we still withhold from them the means to win 

 their moral self-respect. In other words, the task of the European is 



CAXOE AT NUKUTAVAKE ATOLL, PauMOTUS. 



but half completed, and the effect of leaving it at this stage is all too 

 apparent in long settled regions such as the Hawaiian Islands, where, 

 after the most easily attained conversion in the history of the Pacific, 

 the natives have steadily sunken, and are to-day a degraded, downcast 

 remnant — mere peons of commercialism, their past forgotten and their 

 future hopeless. 



How different this history might have been if along with instruction 

 respecting the lives of Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Sampson, the mis- 

 sionaries had maintained the native arts, modifying them to meet the 

 demands of markets which might have provided the native race with a 

 means of livelihood and replaced the lost ambition due to the abolition 

 of war. Beautiful wall papers and screens might have been made from 

 the delicate tapas of old Hawaii, and their women were once skilled to 

 an unusual degree in feather work and weaving. 



We speak of the island races as being " lazy," forgetting that there is 

 as yet no adequate reward for their labor. When opportunity offers, they 

 strive well, as in the crude process of the copra industry, which, after 



