Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/464

460 Tahiti and the natives would be deprived of their lands and reduced to slavery as were the Indians of the West Indies. The opposition of the chiefs was of so determined a nature that the missionaries deemed it advisable to desist, from their attempt, and their effort to introduce a cotton-cloth mill met with similar discouragement.

Indeed, it is doubtful whether the child-like natives would have been either happier or better as mill hands laboring eight or ten hours a day in distilleries or factories than they were each in his own house beneath the palm groves and depending upon the rich bounty of the land and sea for food and clothing. These European autocrats sought in all reforms to begin at the top, and had they displayed the good judgment to teach merely the rudiments of religion, government and agriculture, and to encourage and develop a market for the crafts the natives already practised, they would probably not have felt obliged to complain to Admiral Wilkes that "sincere piety was rarely to be found among the natives."

In 1821 a rebellious return to idolatry broke out among the young and aristocratic element, and after this was sternly suppressed a fanatical sect, the Mamaia, arose in 1828, their leader claiming to be Christ and promising a sensual paradise to his followers. The natives who at first had expected miracles from the white man's god, were, now beginning to lose faith and interest and to loathe the dull life their masters forced upon them, and in 1839, when Admiral Wilkes visited Tahiti he was surprised to find the attendance upon worship on Sunday to be small, less than 200 being present in the church, and most of these being women who "did not appear to be as attentive as they had been represented." These women, he says,

were dressed in a most unbecoming manner in high flaring chip bonnets of their own manufacture, loose gray flowing silk frocks, with showy kerchiefs tied around their necks.

The time has come when the natives of Polynesia are beginning to appeal for freedom to govern and maintain their own churches and under ministers of their own race; to suffer from their own mistakes and win their own achievements.

Yet a great task still remains to the European co-worker for their enlightenment, for everywhere there is a crying need for manual training and technical schools patterned upon the general plan of Booker Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Above all, markets must be sought and developed for the wares and produce of the natives, for most of their present apathy is due to the fact that they can obtain no adequate remuneration of the products of their labor, but are, in effect, penalized for their very industry through the rapacious acts of traders.

Moreover, the present rule of the religious autocrat, essentially altruistic and high minded as it is, has produced only obedient or servile