402 MYSTIC ISLES 



felt themselves unwilling or too poor to entertain the 

 Arioi. These had many devices to overcome such ob- 

 stacles. They would surround a child and pretend to 

 raise him to kingly rank, and then demand from his 

 parents suitable presents for such a distinction. 



At death there were rites for the Arioi apart from 

 those for others. They paid the priest of Romotane, 

 who kept the key of their paradise, to admit the deced- 

 ent to Rohutu noa-noa in the reva or clouds above the 

 mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of Raiatea. 

 The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees de- 

 manded by the priest, and had to be satisfied with a de- 

 nial of this Mussulman Eden reserved for the festive and 

 devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary people perforce ab- 

 stain from intoxicants in America while the rich drink 

 their fill. The historian Lecky says: 



It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian Fathers that con- 

 cupiscence, or the sensual passion, was the "original sin" of 

 human nature ; and it must be owned that the progress of 

 knowledge, which is usually extremely opposed to the ascetic 

 theor}^ of life, concurs with the theological view, in showing 

 the natural force of this appetite to be far greater than the 

 well-being of man requires. The writings of Malthus have 

 proved, what the Greek moralists appear in a considerable 

 degree to have seen, that its normal and temperate exercise 

 would produce, if universal, the utmost calamities to the world, 

 and that, while nature seems, in the most unequivocal manner, 

 to urge the human race to early marriages, the first condition 

 of an advancing civilization is to restrain or diminish them. 



Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all 

 Polynesia, the girls have their fling at promiscuity from 

 puberty to the late teens or early twenties, when an im- 



