Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with
embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat
would be the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some
eastern islands to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and
the mother, so far from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In
some, when his child was born, a chief was superseded and resigned
his name; as though, like a drone, he had then fulfilled the
occasion of his being. And in some the lightest words of children
had the weight of oracles. Only the other day, in the Marquesas,
if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I am assured the
stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in another place
an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki having taken
a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the
situation and loaded me with gifts.

With such sentiments the necessity for child-destruction would not
fail to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling
in the Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a new god
was added to the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished
and made popular. Oro was his name, and he may be compared with
the Bacchus of the ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay,
and from island to island; they were everywhere received with
feasting; wore fine clothes; sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions
of dexterity and strength; and were the artists, the acrobats, the
bards, and the harlots of the group. Their life was public and
epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the highest in the land
aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood next in line to
a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to
spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother
in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of