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 by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii.  And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners.  I do not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count paternal kinship.  It is not possible to give details; suffice it that their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy, reason, and almost life itself are in abeyance.

CHAPTER VI—­CHIEFS AND TAPUS

We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief called Taipi-Kikino.  An elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found his cheerfulness.  He had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget.  His expenses—­for he was always seen attired in virgin white—­must have by far exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings a month.  And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the village.  It was currently supposed that his elder brother, Kauanui, must have helped him out.  But how comes it that the elder brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho?  That the one should be wealthy, and the other almost indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought up in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters.  That the one should be chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all.

Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed.  We have seen, in the same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours.  So when the French overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with a vote for a conseiller-general at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from that, they were revolting public sentiment.  The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment of others may have been needful also; it was at least a delicate business.  The Government of George II. exiled many Highland magnates.  It never occurred to them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more bold, we have yet to see with what success.