OF THE SOUTH SEAS 405 



mitting virtually all castes to it, thus making it a privi- 

 leged democracy, in which birthrights had not the sway 

 they had outside it, but in which the chap who could 

 fight and dance, sing, and tell good stories might climb 

 from lowly position to honor and popularity, and in 

 which a clever woman could make her mark. 



The early missionaries who had to combat the in- 

 fluence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness. 

 In their unsophisticated minds, unprepared by reading 

 or experience for comparisons, most of them sailing di- 

 rectly from English divinity schools or small bucolic 

 pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarian- 

 ism of as much consequence as morals, and vastly more 

 important than health or earthly happiness. They be- 

 lieved in diabolical possession, and were prone to mag- 

 nify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard 

 tasks. When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the 

 bored natives were sometimes scourged into church, and 

 fines and imprisonment for lack of devotion were im- 

 posed by the native courts. Often self-sacrificing, the 

 missionaries felt it was for the natives' eternal walfare, 

 and that souls might be saved even by compulsion. The 

 Arioi society melted under a changed control and 

 Christian precepts. 



Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making 

 few converts, but giving his life to noble effort, medi- 

 tated often upon the success of the missionaries in the 

 South Seas — a success perhaps magnified by the society 

 which financed and cheered the restless men whom it 

 sent to Tahiti. Livingstone in his darker moments, 

 consoling himself with the accounts of these achieve- 

 ments in the missionary annals, doubted his own effi- 



