Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/108

84 the representatives of the London Mission would have been driven out altogether. The trouble was finally compromised by allowing the English missionaries to remain under certain restrictions, and establishing a French Protestant mission to work in harmony with the French Catholic one.



"The great bulk of the people are Protestants, as they adhere to the faith to which they were originally converted. The Society Islands as a whole now contain three English missionaries, sixteen native ordained ministers, and more than two hundred other preachers and teachers. There are four thousand three hundred church members, fifty schools, and more than two thousand scholars attending them. The French do not make much interference except on the island of Tahiti, where only one English missionary is allowed to reside. He is not, however, recognized as a missionary to the natives, but as pastor of the Bethel Church at Papéiti."

"That will do for statistics on that subject," said Frank. "While you have been looking up these points in the history of the islands I've been finding out what they produce."

"I was getting around to that," replied Fred; "but if you've found it out I'm glad. What is it?"

"From all I can learn," said Frank, "the colony isn't a very prosperous one for the French. The exports amount to about a million dollars annually, and the imports to seven hundred thousand dollars; there are no import duties except on fire-arms and spirits, but I am told it is proposed to place a duty on nearly everything consumed here, so as to make the colony self-supporting.

"The people have quite abandoned the manufacture of tappa, or