evidence:  on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for theft was to be killed and eaten.  How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such different blood?  What circumstance is common to them all, but that they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food?  I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only.  When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable mutton.  And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes that a man is ’hungry for fish,’ having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert, begins to lust after flesh-pots.  Add to this the evidences of over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.

It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice.  The higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-sail in their waters.  It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.  The Marquesans intertwined man-eating with the whole texture of their lives; long-pig was in a sense their currency and sacrament; it formed the hire of the artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and attraction of a feast.  To-day they are paying the penalty of this bloody commixture.  The civil power, in its crusade against man-eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript list.  Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women.  And now it has been found needful to forbid the art.  Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen).  They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity them?  The least rigorous will say that they were justly served.