180 A MISSION TO VITI. 
eat human flesh, nor go near the bures when any dead 
bodies have been brought in, and who abominate the 
practice as much as any white man does, attributing to 
it those fearful skin diseases with which their children 
are so often visited. But their opponents, the Conser- 
vatives, maintain that in order to strike terror in the 
enemy and lower classes, it is absolutely necessary for 
great chiefs and gentry—a duty they owe to society— 
to eat human flesh. The feeling which the common 
people have regarding it seems somewhat akin to the 
horror inspired by that part of our nursery tales when 
the giants come home, and begin to smell the children 
concealed. The same enlightened party also objects to 
the killing of women, urging that it is just as cowardly 
to kill a woman as a baby. But here again those who 
advocate inhumanity are triumphant, arguing that if the 
women are killed the men will fret, and thus suffer an 
almost direct punishment ; and further, that as whenever 
there is a quarrel a woman is sure to be at the bottom 
of it, justice demands that her sex, having caused the 
bloodshed, should not escape scot-free. 
It is owing to this powerful ferment, which had pe- 
netrated the whole Fijian community, that cannibalism 
was so speedily abolished in all districts where Chris- 
tian missionaries or European consuls were able to aid 
the good cause by supplying the combatants with fresh 
arguments, and backing them up with all the advan- 
tages derived from their position as respected foreigners. 
There may have been, and I dare say there are to this 
day, individual natives, who, like Naulumatua, have a 
morbid appetite for human flesh, sufficient opportunity to 
