Lecky says that however much moralists may enforce the obligation of extra-matrimonial purity, this obligation has never been even approximately regarded.  One could hardly expect from the heathen Tahitians moral restraint.  Malthus, a Christian clergyman, did not until the second edition of his book add that to vice and misery as checks of nature to an increase of humans faster than the means of subsistence.  Nor have most Christian or civilized nations made such a check effectual.

The ever-dominant and only inherent impulse in all living beings, including man, is the will to remain alive—­the will, that is, to attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.

All schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to put into permanent codes the expedients found useful by some given race in the course of its successful endeavors to remain alive.

Did not Zarathustra so philosophize, and is not the national trend in Europe exalting his theory?  With the difference that nationalism takes the place of individualism in the scheme of survival and a better place in the sun is the legend on the banners.

Unable to find enemies to keep their numbers down, exempt from the epidemics and endemics of Europe and Asia, unacquainted with the contraceptives known until recently only by our rich, but now preached by organized societies to the humblest, the Tahitian, Marquesan, and Hawaiian came to consider the blotting out of lives just begun worthy deeds.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” was our own cynical Western maxim when life and opportunity to lay by for the future meant ceaseless struggle with the dispossessed.

We, in situations of dire necessity, eat our own fellows.  We have done it at sea and on land.  We eat their flesh when shipwreck or isolation urges survival.  We let children die by the myriad for lack of proper care and sustenance, and kill them in factories and tenements to gain luxuries for ourselves.  One justification for slavery was that it gave leisure for culture to the slave-owners, and that Southern chivalry and the charm of Southern womanhood outweighed the fettered black bodies and souls in the scale of achievement.

The Tahitian did the best he could, and the Arioi set the example in a total observance not to be demanded or expected of the mass.  It is related that if the child cried before destruction, it was spared, for they had not the heart to kill it.  If Arioi, the parents must have given it away or otherwise avoided the opprobrium.

Another explanation of the bloody oath of the Arioi might be found in an effort of the princes of Tahiti to prevent in this manner the excessive growth of the Arii, or noble caste.  The Arioi society was founded by princes and led by them, but that they sought to break down the power of the nobles is evidenced by their admitting virtually all castes to it, thus making it a privileged 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.