Procreation, if not a dominant passion, would probably have ceased long ago, and the race perished.  Individual and even national “race suicide” in France and New England indicated the possibilities of this tendency.  The teachings of asceticism which had such power among Christians until the sixteenth century are again heard under a different guise in at least one of the modern cults most successful in the United States.  Neo-Malthusianism is found exemplified in the two-child families of the nobles of France and Germany and the rich of New England.  Parents want to do more for children, and so have fewer, and think proper contraception and even killing the foetus in its early stages.  Modern medicine has aided this.  Many women in many countries for ages have practised abortion in order not to spoil their bodies by child-bearing.  To-day the demands of fashion and of social pleasures have caused large families to be considered even vulgar among the extremists in the mode.  Organizations incited by the new feminism send heralds of contraception schemes on lecture tours to instruct the proletariat, and brave women to go to prison for giving the prescription.  The well-to-do have always been cognizant of it.

The Tahitians have ever been adoring of little ones, and if their annals are stained by the blood of innumerable innocents murdered at birth, let it be remembered that it was a law, and not a choice of parents—­a law induced by the sternest demands of social economy.  Religion or the domination of priests commanded it.  They obeyed, as Abraham did when he began to whet his knife for his son Isaac.  To-day in Europe conditions prescribe conduct.  Morality fades before race demands.  Polygamy or promiscuity looms a possibility, and may yet have state and church sanction, as in Turkey.

In Tahiti, from time immemorial, as native annals went, there was a wondrous set of men and women called Arioi who killed all their children, and whose ways and pleasures recall the phallic worshipers of ancient Asian days.  Forgotten now, with accounts radically differing as to its composition, its aims, and even its morals, a hundred romances and fables woven about its personnel, and many curious hazards upon its beginnings and secret purposes, the Arioi society constitutes a singular mystery, still of intense interest to the student of the cabalistic, though buried with these South Sea Greeks a century ago.

The Arioi, in its time of divertisement, was a lodge of strolling players, musicians, poets, dancers, wrestlers, pantomimists, and clowns, the merry men and women of the Pacific tropics.  They were the leaders in the worship of the gods, the makers and masters of the taboo, and when war or other necessity called them from pleasure or religion, the leaders in action and battle.

The ending of the celebrated order came about through the work of English Christian missionaries and the commercialized conditions accompanying the introduction among the Tahitians of European standards, inventions, customs, and prohibitions.  The institution was of great age, without written chronicles, and, like all Polynesian history, obscured by the superstitions bred of oral descent.