morality is the last field of morality to be brought within the sphere of personal responsibility.  The community imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of sexual morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal responsibility in the matter.  But a training in restraint, when carried through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom.  The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the earlier generations.

The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous organization.  This is especially the case as regards sexual morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a higher with a lower civilization.  It has constantly happened that missionaries—­entirely against their own wishes, it need not be said—­by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted the most disastrous effects on morality.  This has been the case among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel Lambkin (British Medical Journal, Oct. 3, 1908).

As regards Polynesia, also, R.L.  Stevenson, in his interesting book, In the South Seas (Ch.  V), pointed out that, while before the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole, chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.

Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore—­who was High Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent critic—­missionary effort has been “wonderfully successful,” where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered.  This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the native races in Fiji.  Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report (Australasian Review of Reviews, Oct., 1897) remarks:  “Not a few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type.  The abolition of polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in favor of women.  The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be carried by one.  In heathen times