Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/67

 ten, giving the history of this people since the advent of the first missionary delegation, we have no detail of the slow and almost fruitless work which it must certainly have been to them—the gradual rise and the certain relapse, the brilliant hope and promise, and the despairing outbreak anew of savage habits. The prophecy of success came in the dawning of their intelligence, and was followed by the all but hopeless return to their barbaric fears. It must have been nothing other than the alternation of hope and despair.

The time of the missionaries' coming was fortunate in this, that having just broken up the faéu and thrown down their idols, they had not found, nor sought, nor felt the need of anything to take their place. The missionary idea is one of self-sacrifice and toil; the missionary experience has proved equal to their completest expectation. We have no right to be late in our recognition of the services which they have rendered,

nor chary of our praise to those whose spirit of disinterestedness and lofty principle led them to attempt and pursue the

task of civilizing this people. Codperating with this active purpose has always been that other civilizing influence, unconscious and unintentional, the commercial contact with the representatives of our own race. These two active influences have made the Hawaiian people, from the nothing they were as a nation, the little which they are to-day. The movement has been slow, and it has been difficult to tell, from books alone, how the work has been thus far consummated. The enthusiasm of the missionaries has credited all the civilizing influences to themselves, and it has seemed as though the language of courtesy was hardly strong or elastic enough, to properly characterize the depth of depravity, want of moral principle, and actual wicked intent, which found their consummation in the lives and habits of the foreigners, who for

many years were the only other white residents in those lands. On the other side, the bounds of politeness have had no restraint upon the denunciations which have been poured forth on what has been called the officious meddling and selfish aggrandizement of those, who, by virtue of their professed purpose and expressed intent, were in closer relations with the reigning powers. It is the story over again of the contact of hard practical sense, with honest and impracticable theory. Barbarism cannot credit equal results to each influence, but that will be an untrue account which fails to concede much to the example of common life, even if it concedes much more to religious precept and noble intent, and can point to invaluable gains which were their logical result.

The Hawaiian people of to-day, by those who like to congratulate themselves and their clerical brethren upon an extraordinary result of noble toil and devotion, are called a civilized people. One writer, who believes in the converted natives, with whom he has lived more than twenty years, and, possibly, too much distrusts the earlier civilized people, from whom he has been absent most of the years of his discretion, comes to "the honest conclusion that, in proportion to the population of the islands, there are, upon an average, as many true Christians among them as there are among the people of America or Europe," and excepts neither New or Old England, nor Scotland, nor the most favored portion of either.

The natives have professedly given up their idol-worship and their false religion; in the settled communities they clothe themselves; churches have been built for them, and they attend in vast numbers and with apparent zeal; an educational system, fostering schools of the higher studies, has been established, which is of such completeness, that scarcely a native can be found who cannot read and write his native lan