188 MELANESIA AND ITS PEOPLE. 
THE CHILDREN. 
Great care is expended in bathing small children and shielding them 
from the rays of the sun. A young mother is excused from all work 
and she has the best time in all her life when her first baby is born. 
Her whole time is given up to the child, and it is seldom out of her 
arms. Owing to the lack of nourishing foods children are suckled 
till they are quite large. The Melanesian baby seems to have no 
natural liking for water and one often hears the shrill cries of small 
children being bathed in the streams or being washed in the houses. 
In the latter case water is poured from a bamboo into one of the wooden 
bowls and the child is then washed by hand. 
The children at a very early stage of their existence are freed from 
the authority of their parents. They have no household duties to 
perform; there is no set time for meals; in the morning they may be 
given something cold left over from the night before, or the mother 
may roast a yam on the fire, but as a rule there is no cooking done till 
the late afternoon, when the women return from their gardens. During 
the day, if the children are hungry they can get a coconut or a bread- 
fruit, or shell-fish, or they can roast a yam or a taro, and a fire can be 
made anywhere. ‘The boys can get themselves an opossum or an 
iguana and in the hill districts they even find grasshoppers to eat. 
One and all they use large quantities of areca nut and pepper leaf and 
lime. ‘These seem to be as necessary to the Melanesians of the north- 
ern islands as is a pipe to a confirmed smoker. 
One would expect that children freed thus early from any depend- 
ence on their elders would run riot and learn licentious ways and 
habits, but such does not seem to be the case. ‘There is but little 
individuality in Melanesians, and they are not “inventors of evil 
things.”’ ‘They are bound by traditional customs, by the laws of the 
elders, by those social restrictions that the people have evolved for 
themselves as a safeguard against the breaking up of their society, 
and free agents though the children may be, and lacking parental 
control from our point of view, yet there is no such thing among them 
as the organized following or doing of evil, and the ruling moral ideas 
of the people are found as the guide also of their children. 
EVANGELIZATION. 
Apart from the duty and privilege which every Christian feels of 
winning the peoples of the earth for Christ, apart also from the prompt- 
ings of the Holy Spirit to bring the peoples of Melanesia to a knowl- 
edge of the power of Christ, there can be no conceivable reason for 
holding that Melanesians have no need of the Christian religion or 
could fail to grasp it when presented to them. In the first place, they 
certainly lose nothing by renouncing their old Heathen religion, which 
was the worship of their ancestors. ‘The spirits of these ancestors 
