Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/442

 Rh It must be recollected, that large amounts of the imports were purchased for reshipment, from this central position, or entre-depot, to California, the Russian settlements, and the Southern Islands.

There are sixty families of Americans, including the missions, on the Islands, and about an equal number formed by intermarriage with the natives. The Americans exceed, by several hundreds, all other foreigners, the most numerous of whom are English and Chinese. The cost valuation of our citizens property, in buildings, furniture, &c, cannot be less than one hundred thousand dollars; while the whole amount invested in permanent improvements, agriculture, vessels, and stock in trade, is certainly over one million. In 1836, it was rated at but four hundred thousand dollars, and the property of other foreigners at one-fifth.

When the first missionaries arrived in these Islands, in 1820, they found an idle, vicious, profligate population; a nation given up to sensuality, lying, drunkenness, riot, treachery, lewdness, and murder; men with whom retaliation signified justice, and who retained, amid their moral ruin, but a single virtue, and that one the stoic power of endurance, derived from listlessness and an utter disregard of life.

But under the management of the judicious persons who were sent out to these Islands, the whole aspect of affairs has been changed. Amid the taunts of careless visitors, and the immoral interference of many whose pride it should have been to rebuke a spirit of disorder, and to encourage the missionaries in their noble labors, they have persevered in the foundation of a Christian Church, and the formation of a Government, which, "if left to itself, and treated by other nations with justice and courtesy, is fully competent to discharge all its relations, not only for the maintenance of its own internal peace, and the security of person and property to all who visit its shores, but to conform to all the settled principles of international law."

The missionaries have overcome a multitude of difficulties. They have almost blotted out the vices that characterized the Islands, at their advent. They found intoxicating liquors forced on the natives by the French Government, through the hostile intervention of its navy, and they put down intemperance by the moral power of societies. They met the introduction of a different sect by additional zeal. They found a people grossly ignorant, and they taught them the wisdom of other nations. They found a band of savages, with a rich soil, fierce tempers, and abandoned habits; and they have, while civilizing the people and bringing them into the folds of Christianity, taught them the value of their lands, the dignity and usefulness of commerce and labor, and the excellence of virtue. After twenty years of missionary labor, one of these gentlemen was called on to deliver a course of lectures on political science, and the result was a Constitution and a Code of Laws—regulating every department of an organized Government on a plan as near as wisdom would allow the adoption of our system among a people emerging into civilization. Two extensive editions of the Bible have been distributed over the Islands; more than seventeen thousand Protestants gather in the churches, and eighteen thousand children are educated in the schools!

Thus silently, and almost unknown to us, away in those distant seas, has a nation been called into existence by a few Christian teachers, without arms, and by moral influences alone. Barbarous idolatry, and brutal sensuality, have been abandoned, and Christianity and civilization have taken their places. The commercial advantages of the Islands have, at the same time, attracted the attention