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 Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who share with them
their hire. Stanislao's opinion of a decay of virtue even in these
unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his very
example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced