to make changes. It is surely his business, for example, to
prevent war; and yet I have instanced war itself as one of the
elements of health. On the other hand, it were, perhaps, easy for
the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard every change
as an affair of weight. I take the average missionary; I am sure I
do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate
to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago.
Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that
change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.

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,