Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous Marquesas valleys to the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet, the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in the coral or bamboo church, as it is in the temples of New York. The nightgown or Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper female attire for natives in the house of God, and thus, by gradual establishment of a fashion, in their straw homes, and everywhere. Chiefesses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim trousers of refinement. The trader came to sell them, and so business followed the Bible. Tattooing, which, with the Polynesians and Melenesians, was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity. A man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous arabesques and gaudy pictures of palms and fish was not apt to hide them under garments. 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.