MALTHUSIAN MOTIVE FOR INFANTICIDE. 257 
the means of subsistence: the climate was so 
warm, that the clothing required, as well as the 
food, could be procured with the greatest facility; 
yet they considered the little trouble required as 
an irksome task. A man with three or four chil¬ 
dren, and this was a rare occurrence, was said to 
be a taata taubuubuu , a man with an unwieldy 
or cumbrous burden ; and there is reason to believe 
that, simply to avoid the trifling care and effort 
necessary to provide for their offspring during the 
helpless periods of infancy and childhood, multi¬ 
tudes were consigned to an untimely grave. A 
Malthusian motive has sometimes been adduced, 
and they have been heard to say, that if all the 
children born were allowed to live, there would not 
be food enough produced in the islands to sup¬ 
port them. This, however, has only been resorted 
to when other methods of defending the practice 
have failed. 
During the whole of their lives, the females were 
subject to the most abasing degradation; and 
their sex was often, at their birth, the cause of 
their destruction : if the purpose of the unnatural 
parents had not been fully matured before, the 
circumstance of its being a female child, was 
often sufficient to fix their determination on its 
death. Whenever we have asked them, what 
could induce them to make a distinction so invi¬ 
dious, they have generally answered,—that the 
fisheries, the service of the temple, and especially 
war, were the only purposes for which they thought 
it desirable to rear children ; that in these pursuits 
women were comparatively useless ; and therefore 
female children were frequently not suffered to 
live. Facts fully confirm these statements. 
In the adult population of the islands at the time 
s 
