Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/69



not the night's. In sickness they almost invariably pay tribute to their uplifted sense by calling educated physicians, and tribute to their ancient credulity by employing also the native doctor. The duplicity they conceal from one— from both, if they can. In paying the tributes and taking both prescriptions, the mixtures too often create equal derangement in intellectual and physical life. Many still keep concealed their old idols, and when they die, the heathen dread not unfrequently overcomes what they have of Christian trust, and they flee for safety to the gods of their pagan days, for they believe they are acquainted with them.

Until the very fibre of the native mind is changed, there will be still left thereon the pictures which the superstitions of ages have impressed. When the native body has become spiritualized and the mind infused, through long intercourse, with lofty thoughts and holy emotions, the licentiousness, which is inborn and so extensive as to be national, may be exiled; and drunkenness, whether in response to the heathen taste for awa, which they have always known, or the modern taste for the most wretched alcoholic compounds, may be banished and forgotten. The old language had in it no word that signified the quality of chastity, and it is doubtful, if to-day the language were any richer, whether there could be found anything among the whole native population of the full blood to which the word could be applied. Decent living is so monotonous to their instincts, that it is not strange that every occasion of excitement has a tendency to drag them, temporarily, back into the stupendous revelry that was the glory and the consummation of the barbaric life. Thus, while it may have been a matter of profound regret, it need not have been of surprise to a sensible mind, that at the recent (1864) death of the Princess Victoria, whose life and character could be amply described without seeking for

words outside the native dialect, the king and his native court within the palace indulged in the old time Awlahuda. Assuring the absence of anything civilized or humane by a native patrol, in the nude presence of both sexes they kept up the revelry of drunkenness and dissoluteness about the corpse of the poor royal sinner, till human nature could not bear the burden longer.

The government is nominally under the rule of the King, Kamehameha V, who succeeded, by appointment, his brother. But the native blood is evident in his royal veins, acknowledging the superiority of the white, and putting no confidence in the wisdom of his own race, and placing foreigners in the places of his cabinet and upon the bench of the Supreme Court. The natives occupy seats as nobles and representatives, the king. being always able to hold a majority, but the guiding force of legislation is the intelligence of the foreigners, who are virtually in all matters of consequence the rulers of the kingdom. A peculiarity of the higher classes is that ofrank. They still talk of chiefs and chiefesses, taking their rank from the mother, in memory, perhaps in respect, of an ancient wisdom of that people, that while his paternal derivative was to every child a matter of profoundest doubt, and might even fade from the maternal memory, it was a matter of comparative certainty who was his mother. The Hawaiian people are not yet a civilized people, although they are not indeed savages. As individuals they excite no personal interest or sympathy, and as a nation they are uninteresting to the last degree.

It is the drivel of selfishness that charges the deficiency in their civilization to what is called, in the impertinent phrase of interested traders, "the meddling of the missionaries "with the government. That an inferior people, looking up for light, should ask every aid from those who came professedly to teach them any good thing, and but little from