Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/71



advent of ship-loads of sailors from the time of Cook till now, has completed the work. In 1832 the population was, by census, 130,315; in 1836 it had fallen to 108,579; in 1850, to 84,165. The year 1848 is remembered as "the year of death," when 10,000 died from the specific diseases named above. In 1860 the number of natives had decreased to 61,800; at present it is estimated at about 50,000. It is believed that in the progress of civilization the great mortality of the nation will be stayed. The experience in our own country does not encourage that hope. The degraded native seems to adopt the vices of the civilized race quite as soon as its virtues. In the old Kanaka language there was no oath, but these natives early acquired an education in profanity, and now mingle the English oath and the Hawaiian speech with considerable ease.

To speak of the civilization of the

Hawaiian people, is but following a priestly fashion and acknowledging the

existence of what is not. For civilization, in modern phrase, is the structure of the people, representing the highest results of average modern culture. It answers any question concerning the capacity and reasonable hope and expectation of a people. The nation that has reached it asks no stranger's arm, for it is sustained by its own strength. We recognize the best results of the missionaries' work, but in the heartiest expression of their self-congratulations we can hear no syllable of trust in this people's self-sustenance. If one should hint of the native ministers and teachers as a sufficient stay and support of their civilization, and earnest of their future progress, not one but would answer doubtingly of reeds—bent, and too easily broken.

To say boldly that by natural inheritance, as the yet unreclaimed estate coming to us, "the heir of all the ages and the youngest born of Time," these

lands and their people should be ours, might meet some opposition. It would come from those who never favor the extension of our sovereignty over territory which has not always been ours, and from those who recognize no national safeguards in those stations, that stand like trusty sentinels on our distant right and left. But we take what to such may appear a worthier position, affirming that to make them ours, so that they be a part with us and of us, will be the consummation of the missionary labor—the final and complete conquest of the latest and thus far best civilization, over the reluctant and unyielding stronghold of heathenism. He would indeed be a poor political economist, who would ask a demonstration of benefits to them and to us from bringing a people of unmatured capacities and a land of indefinite possibilities, with all its uncultivated fertility, into the fold of our nationality, and with them an unrestrained competition with our Saxon sinews, our straightest furrows and our proudest sheaves. Perhaps the commercial argument is the strongest with which to attack any prejudice against their annexation to our republic. It touches the Hawaiians as well as ourselves. The earnest hope with which the people there look for our ratification of the treaty of reciprocity, already ratified by their government, and which proposes such a change in the present revenue system, indicates how much they estimate the necessity that they and we should be brought into nearer mercantile contact. Whether or not it originated with them, it meets the swift and earnest advocacy of all the brain and active sinew of that kingdom. We cannot here examine critically and specifically the whole instrument, but only say in general that it preposes free importation hence of those articles most necessary in the islands, and free importation hither of every except the most desirable article produced there. Of sug