And here the censor also had an ally in the trader. The two joined, unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the new morality of the converts. The censorious cleric said that the Lord disliked nakedness, or, at least, that unclothedness was unvirtuous, while the seller of calico and alcohol advised the purchase of his goods for the sake of style. He ridiculed tattooing and nudity, but he also laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused indigene, driven by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming stuffs, and finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in the South Seas achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made into law the mores his sect or tribe had coined into morals, and was able to punish by civil tribunal the evildoers who refused to abide by his conception of the divine wish.
But here, old Mother Nature revolted. All over the world it would appear that she is not in touch with the divinity that shapes the ends of the censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South Seas killed them. They sweated and remained foul; they swam, and kept on their garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool, They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They passed away as the tiaré Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich earth which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands. Only a mournful remnant remains to observe the censorship.
But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to make the assumed infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an invented god, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was arrested for napping on his own paepae partly clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the gendarme fined him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had cast a blight upon the more poetical whites. I remember one night when my vessel was anchored for a few hours in the roadstead of a lonely island, a group of civil servants and a minister of the Church of England had come aboard to buy what comforts they might from our civilized caravan. They sat on deck clinking glasses occasionally, talking of cities where a man might be freed from the "continuous spying of the uncoo good." That was the phrase they used, being English or Scots, and when the word was passed that we up-anchored with the turn of the tide at midnight, they sang in a last burst of lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza lingers with me:—
Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound,
Pass the flowing goblet round!
May no mournful voice be found,
Though wowzers do attack us!
In the darkness I called to them as they went down the gangway into their boat, "What is a wowzer?"
"'E's a bloomin' —— 'oo wants to do unto others wot 'e's bleedin' well done to 'imself."
The wowzers are more active in Hawaii, the most temperate portion of Polynesia, than in the Maori isles of New Zealand. A law passed at the last session of the Hawaiian legislature prohibits "any person over fourteen years of age from appearing upon the streets of Honolulu in a bathing suit unless covered suitably by an outer garment reaching at least to the knees." There is a ferment in Honolulu over the arrest and punishment of offenders against this new censorship. It is the result of the control by the spiritual, or perhaps, lineal, descendants of the first South Sea censors, of the great grand-children of those men who wore the girdles of leaves at the landing of the Marlboro school teacher a hundred years ago. The girdle-wearers are members of the Hawaiian legislature—soon to be succeeded by Japanese-native-born—and the censors, likely, are wives of financiers and sugar factors. Again the feeble remnant of the Hawaiian race voted against the girdle.
A friend of mine, grandson of the estimable missionary and his bride of the New England of a century ago, thus comments upon the law in a paper sent to me:—
The facts which caused the passage of the law were, that certain residents of Waikiki were donning their bathing suits at home, walking across and along the public streets to the sea and returning in the same state of undress.
If the bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted, bloomer-breeched and stockinged.