There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism.  I have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion—­all causes frequently adduced.  And I have said nothing of them because they are conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past than in the present.  Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be asked?  Was not the Polynesian always unchaste?  Doubtless he was so always:  doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe.  Take the Hawaiian account of Cook:  I have no doubt it is entirely fair.  Take Krusenstern’s candid, almost innocent, description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas, and carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides, how the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as appears plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.  Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation.  Mr. Lawes, the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites.  In heathen time, if a girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the infant down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small.  Or take the Marquesas.  Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection, the young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in promiscuous liberty.  Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my authority, and declare themselves better informed.  I should prefer the statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest traveller.  A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party, receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the manners of the island.  It is not considered what class is mostly seen.  Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge England by the ladies who parade