prevent any particular evil may be beyond comparison worse than the evil itself.”[182] Life itself may be bought too dear. No good is done, however, by denying that excessive numbers are an evil, or by optimistic assertion that if men are only good they will be happy. There is at least one Polynesian island whose past history gives a picturesque proof of the contrary. Pitcairn, “the lonely isle of the Mutineers,” was a moral contrast to Otaheite. The inhabitants owed nothing good to their parents, who were the mutineers of H.M.S. ‘Bounty,’ and the women of Otaheite that came with them in 1790, when they first took refuge in Pitcairn Island. They owed all to the religious teaching of John Adams, which made them so good, that there were few like them on the earth.[183] But in latitudes just touching the tropics, with a single square mile of poor soil, surrounded by wide ocean, they had no outlet for trade and modern arts. Like the inhabitants of Godwin’s Utopia,[184] they soon peopled the little country to the full extent of the food that could be got by the old methods, and, unlike the Utopians, they had not skill to invent new. If they had not drawn the line for themselves, misery would have done it for them. Their little colony at its first founding consisted of fifteen men and twelve women. Fourteen men and many women died off in the course of the ten years which passed before the time of moral regeneration. But they left many children; and, when the patriarch John Adams was visited by a passing ship in 1814, he was surrounded by a happy circle of devout families. Rapidly outgrowing the resources of the place, these simple folk removed in 1831 to Tahiti, eighty-seven strong. Some remained there; others had no pleasure in their new abode, and came back to suffer affliction with the people of God, believing with Malthus that “a cause which may prevent any particular evil may be beyond all comparison worse than the evil itself.” The evil was real, however, and, in default of celibacy or new ways of bread winning, their only cure seemed emigration. So in 1855, Tahiti seeming ineligible, they journeyed further west to Norfolk Island. Though there are more than four hundred and forty to the square mile in England and Wales, two hundred people of this primitive sort had been certainly too many for the single square mile of Pitcairn Island; and they did not leave a moment too soon. Home sickness brought back two entire families (of seventeen persons) in 1859. One or two stray travellers joined them five years afterwards; but, with allowance for these, we find that the increase of population on Pitcairn Island reaches the highest estimate of Malthus. When the English Admiral D’Horsey visited the place in 1878, the quarter of a hundred had grown in nineteen years, at the moderate cost of twelve deaths, to a population of ninety[185] persons. The primeval virtues will avail little without the modern arts.