With thanks to Gary Scharnhorst for publishing these letters in his book "Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics", he writes that Twain was invited "to reminisce about the islands in the New York Tribune soon after the death of King Kamehameha..." Scharnhorst quotes from Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, "...Mr. Clemens. as those who know him will testify, is not only a wit, but a shrewd and accurate observer..." Mark Twain submitted two letters, published in the January 6th and 9th editions of the paper. They are also available, with annotations, at the Mark Twain Project, see the links at the top of each letter presented here:
Enclosure with 3 January 1873 To Whitelaw Reid • (2nd of 2) • Hartford, Conn.
(SLC 1873)
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: When you do me the honor to suggest that I write an article about the Sandwich Islands, just now when the death of the King has turned something of the public attention in that direction, you unkennel a man whose modesty would have kept him in hiding otherwise. I could fill you full of statistics, but most human beings like gossip better, & so you will not blame me if I proceed after the largest audience & leave other people to worry the minority with arithmetic.
I spent several months in the Sandwich Islands, six years ago, &, if I could have my way about it, I would go back there & remain the rest of my days. It is paradise for an indolent man. If a man is rich he can live expensively, & his grandeur will be respected as in other parts of the earth; if he is poor he can herd with the natives, & live on next to nothing; he can sun himself all day long under the palm trees, & be no more troubled by his conscience than a butterfly would.
When you are in that blessed retreat, you are safe from the turmoil of life; you drowse your days away in a long deep dream of peace; the past is a forgotten thing, the present is heaven, the future you leave to take care of itself. You are in the center of the Pacific Ocean; you are two thousand miles from any continent; you are millions of miles from the world; as far as you can see, on any hand, the crested billows wall the horizon, & beyond this barrier the wide universe is but a foreign land to you, & barren of interest.
The climate is simply delicious—never cold at the sea level, & never really too warm, for you are at the half-way house—that is, twenty degrees above the equator. But then you may order your own climate for this reason: the eight inhabited islands are merely mountains that lift themselves out of the sea—a group of bells, if you please, with some (but not very much) “flare” at their basis. You get the idea. Well, you take a thermometer, & mark on it where you want the mercury to stand permanently forever (with not more than 12 degrees variation) Winter & Summer. If 82 in the shade is your figure (with the privilege of going down or up 5 or 6 degrees at long intervals), you build your house down on the “flare”—the sloping or level ground by the sea-shore—& you have the deadest surest thing in the world on that temperature. And such is the climate of Honolulu, the capital of the kingdom. If you mark 70 as your mean temperature, you build your house on any mountain side, 400 or 500 feet above sea level. If you mark 55 or 60, go 1,500 feet higher. If you mark for Wintry weather, go on climbing & watching your mercury. If you want snow & ice forever & ever, & zero & below, build on the summit of Mauna Kea, 16,000 feet up in the air. If you must have hot weather, you should build at Lahaina, where they do not hang the thermometer on a nail because the solder might melt & the instrument get broken; or you should build in the crater of Kilauea, which would be the same as going home before your time. You cannot find as much climate bunched together anywhere in the world as you can in the Sandwich Islands. You may stand on the summit of Mauna Kea, in the midst of snow-banks that were there before Capt. Cook was born, may be, & while you shiver in your furs you may cast your eye down the sweep of the mountain side & tell exactly where the frigid zone ends & vegetable life begins; a stunted & tormented growth of trees shades down into a taller & freer species, & that in turn, into the full foliage & varied tints of the temperate zone; further down, the mere ordinary green tone of a forest washes over the edges of a broad bar of orange trees that embraces the mountain like a belt, & is so deep & dark a green that distance makes it black; & still further down, your eye rests upon the levels of the sea-shore, where the sugar-cane is scorching in the sun, & the feathery cocoa-palm glassing itself in the tropical waves: & where you know the sinful natives are lolling about in utter nakedness & never knowing or caring that you & your snow & your chattering teeth are so close by. So you perceive, you can look down upon all the climates of the earth, & note the kinds & colors of all the vegetations, just with a glance of the eye—& this glance only travels over about three miles as the bird flies, too.
The natives of the islands number only about 50,000, & the whites about 3,000, chiefly Americans. According to Capt. Cook, the natives numbered 400,000 less than a hundred years ago. But the traders brought labor & fancy diseases—in other words, long, deliberate, infallible destruction; & the missionaries brought the means of grace & got them ready. So the two forces are working along harmoniously, & anybody who knows anything about figures can tell you exactly when the last Kanaka will be in Abraham’s bosom & his islands in the hands of the whites. It is the same as calculating an eclipse—if you get started right, you cannot miss it. For nearly a century the natives have been keeping up a ratio of about three births to five deaths, & you can see what that must result in. No doubt in fifty years a Kanaka will be a curiosity in his own land, & as an investment will be superior to a circus.
I am truly sorry that these people are dying out, for they are about the most interesting savages there are. Their language is soft & musical, it has not a hissing sound in it, & all their words end with a vowel. They would call Jim Fisk Jimmy Fikki, for they will even do violence to a proper name if it grates too harshly in its natural state. The Italian is raspy & disagreeable compared to the Hawaiian tongue.
These people used to go naked, but the missionaries broke that up; in the towns the men wear clothing now, & in the country a plug hat & a breech-clout; or if they have company they put on a shirt collar & a vest. Nothing but religion & education could have wrought these admirable changes. The women wear a single loose calico gown, that falls without a break from neck to heels.
In the old times, to speak plainly, there was absolutely no bar to the commerce of the sexes. To refuse the solicitations of a stranger was regarded as a contemptible thing for a girl or a woman to do; but the missionaries have so bitterly fought this thing that they have succeeded at least in driving it out of sight—& now it exists only in reality, not in name.
These natives are the simplest, the kindest-hearted, the most unselfish creatures that bear the image of the Maker. Where white influence has not changed them, they will make any chance stranger welcome, & divide their all with him—a trait which has never existed among any other people, perhaps. They live only for to-day; to-morrow is a thing which does not enter into their calculations. I had a native youth in my employ in Honolulu, a graduate of a missionary college, & he divided his time between translating the Greek Testament & taking care of a piece of property of mine which I considered a horse. Whenever this boy could collect his wages, he would go & lay out the entire amount, all the way up from fifty cents to a dollar, in poi (which is a paste made of the taro root, & is the national dish), & call in all the native ragamuffins that came along to help him eat it. And there, in the rich grass, under the tamarind trees, the gentle savages would sit & gorge till all was gone. My boy would go hungry & content for a day or two, & then some Kanaka he probably had never seen before would invite him to a similar feast, & give him a fresh start.
The ancient religion was only a jumble of curious superstitions. The shark seems to have been the god they chiefly worshiped—or rather sought to propitiate. Then there was Pele, a goddess who presided over the terrible fires of Kilauea; minor gods were not scarce. The natives are all Christians, now—every one of them; they all belong to the church, & are fonder of theology than they are of pie; they will sweat out a sermon as long as the Declaration of Independence; the duller it is the more it infatuates them; they would sit there & stew & stew in a trance of enjoyment till they floated away in their own grease if the ministers would stand watch-&-watch, & see them through. Sunday-schools are a favorite dissipation with them, & they never get enough. If there was physical as well as mental intoxication in this limb of the service, they would never draw a sober breath. Religion is drink & meat to the native. He can read his neatly printed Bible (in the native tongue—every solitary man, woman, & little child in the islands can), & he reads it over & over again. And he reads a whole world of moral tales, built on the good old Sunday-school book pattern exaggerated, & he worships their heroes—heroes who walk the world with their mouths full of butter, & who are simply impossibly chuckle-headed & pious. And he knows all the hymns you ever heard in your life, & he sings them in a soft, pleasant voice, to native words that make “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand” sound as grotesquely & sweetly foreign to you as if it were a dictionary grinding wrong end first though a sugar-mill. Now you see how these natives, great & small, old & young, are saturated with religion—at least the poetry & the music of it. But as to the practice of it, they vary. Some of the nobler precepts of Christianity they have always practiced naturally, & they always will. Some of the minor precepts they as naturally do not practice, & as naturally they never will. The white man has taught them to lie, & they take to it pleasantly & without sin—for there cannot be much sin in a thing which they cannot be made to comprehend is a sin. Adultery they look upon as poetically wrong but practically proper.
These people are sentimentally religious—perhaps that describes it. They pray & sing & moralize in fair weather, but when they get into trouble, that is “business”—& then they are tolerably apt to drop poetry & call on the Great Shark God of their fathers to give them a lift. Their ancient superstitions are in their blood & bones, & they keep cropping out now & then in the most natural & pardonable way.
The natives make excellent seamen, & the whalers would rather have them than any other race. They are so tractable, docile & willing, & withal so faithful, that they rank first in the sugar-planters’ esteem as laborers. Do not these facts speak well for our poor, brown Sunday-school children of the far islands?
There is a small property tax, & any native who has an income of $50 a year can vote.
The 3,000 whites in the islands handle all the money & carry on all the commerce & agriculture—& superintend the religion. Americans are largely in the majority. These whites are sugar-planters, merchants, whale-ship officers, & missionaries. The missionaries are sorry the most of the other whites are there, & these latter are sorry the missionaries don’t migrate. The most of the belt of sloping land that borders the sea & rises toward the bases of the mountains, is rich & fertile. There are only 200,000 acres of this productive soil, but only think of its capabilities! In Louisiana, 200,000 acres of sugar land would only yield 50,000 tuns of sugar per annum, & possibly not so much; but in the Sandwich Islands, you could get at least 400,000 tuns out of it. This is a good, strong statement, but it is true, nevertheless. Two & a half tuns to the acre is a common yield in the islands; three & a half tuns is by no means unusual; five tuns is frequent; & I can name the man who took fifty tuns of sugar from seven acres of ground, one season. This cane was on the mountain-side, 2,500 feet above sea level, & it took it three years to mature. Address your inquiries to Capt. McKee, Island of Maui, S. I. Few plantations are stuck up in the air like that, & so twelve months is ample time for the maturing of cane down there. And I would like to call attention to two or three exceedingly noteworthy facts. For instance, there you do not hurry up & cut your cane when it blossoms, but you just let it alone & cut it when you choose—no harm will come of it. And you do not have to keep an army of hands to plant in the planting season, grind in the grinding season, & rush in frantically & cut down the crop when a frost threatens. Not at all. There is no hurry. You run a large plantation with but a few hands, because you plant pretty much when you please, & you cut your cane & grind it when it suits your convenience. There is no frost, & the longer the cane stands the better it grows. Sometimes—often, in fact—part of your gang are planting a field, another part are cutting the crop from an adjoining field, & the rest are grinding at the mill. You only plant once in three years, & you take off two ratoon crops without replanting. You may keep on taking off ratoon crops about as long as you please, indeed; every year the bulk of the cane will be smaller, but the juice will grow regularly denser & richer, & so you are all right. I know of one lazy man who took off sixteen ratoon crops without replanting!
What fortunes those planters made during our war, when sugar went up into the twenties! It had cost them about ten or eleven cents a pound, delivered in San Francisco, & all charges paid. Now if any one desires to know why these planters would probably like to be under our flag, the answer is simple: We make them pay us a duty of four cents a pound on refined sugars at present; brokerage, freights & handling (two or three times), costs three cents more; rearing the cane, & making the sugar, is an item of five cents more—total, 12 cents a pound, or within a cent of it, anyhow. And to-day refined sugar is only worth about 12½ cents (wholesale) in our markets. Profit—none worth mentioning. But if we were to annex the islands & do away with that crushing duty of four cents a pound, some of those heavy planters who can hardly keep their heads above water now, would clear $75,000 a year & upward. Two such years would pay for their plantations, & all their stock & machinery. It is so long since I was in the islands that I feel doubtful about swearing that the United States duties on their sugars was four cents a pound, but I can swear it was not under three.
I would like to say a word about the late King Kamehameha V. & the system of government, but I will wait a day. Also, I would like to know why your correspondents so calmly ignore the true heir to the Sandwich Islands throne, as if he had no existence & no chances; & I would like to heave in a word for him. I refer to our stanch American sympathizer, Prince William Lunalilo, descendant of eleven generations of sceptered savages—a splendid fellow, with talent, genius, education, gentlemanly manners, generous instincts, & an intellect that shines as radiantly through floods of whisky as if that fluid but fed a calcium light in his head. All people in the islands know that William—or “Prince Bill,” as they call him, more in affection than otherwise—stands next the throne; & so why is he ignored?
Mark Twain.
Hartford, 3d January, 1873.
Enclosure with
6 January 1873 To Whitelaw Reid • Hartford, Conn.
(SLC 1873)
Sir: Having explained who the 3,000 whites are, & what sort of people the 50,000 natives are, I will now shovel in some information as to how this toy realm, with its toy population, is governed. By a constable & six policemen? By a justice of the peace & a jury? By a mayor & a board of aldermen? Oh, no. But by a King—& a Parliament—& a Ministry—& a Privy Council—& a standing army (200 soldiers)—& a navy (steam ferry-boat & a raft)—& a grand bench of supreme justices—& a lord high sheriff on each island. That is the way it is done. It is like propelling a sardine dish with the Great Eastern’s machinery.
Something over 50 years ago the natives, by a sudden impulse which they could not understand themselves, burned all their idols & overthrew the ancient religion of the land. Curiously enough, our first invoice of missionaries were sailing around the Horn at the time, & they arrived just in season to furnish the people a new & much better means of grace. They baptized men, women, & children at once & by wholesale, & proceeded to instruct them in the tenets of the new religion immediately afterward. They built enormous churches, & received into communion as many as 5,000 people in a single day. The fame of it went abroad in the earth, & everywhere the nations rejoiced; the unworldly called it a “great awakening,” & even the unregenerated were touched, & spoke of it with admiration. The missionaries learned the language, translated the Bible & other books into it, established schools, & even very complete colleges, & taught the whole nation to read & write; the princes & nobles acquired collegiate educations, & became familiar with half a dozen dead & living languages. Then, some twenty years later, the missionaries framed a constitution which became the law of the land. It lifted woman up to a level with her lord; it placed the tenant less at the mercy of his landlord; it established a just & equable system of taxation; it introduced the ballot & universal suffrage; it defined & secured to king, chiefs, & people their several rights & privileges; & it instituted a parliament in which all the estates of the realm were to be represented, &, if I remember rightly, it gave this parliament power to pass laws over the King’s veto.
Things went on swimmingly for several years, & especially under the reign of the late King’s brother, an enlightened & liberal-minded prince; but when he died & Kamehameha V. ascended the throne, matters took a different turn. He was one of your swell “grace of God” Kings, & not the “figure-head ” some have said he was; indeed, he was the biggest power in the Islands all his days, & his royal will was sufficient to create a law any time or overturn one.
He was master in the beginning, & at the middle, & to the end. The Parliament was the “figure-head,” & it never was much else in his time. One of his very first acts was to fly into a splendid passion (when his Parliament voted down some measure of his), & tear the beautiful Constitution into shreds, & stamp on them with his royal No. 18s! And his next act was to violently prorogue the Parliament & send the members about their business. He hated Parliaments, as being a rasping & useless incumbrance upon a king, but he allowed them to exist because as an obstruction they were more ornamental than real. He hated universal suffrage & he destroyed it—at least, he took the insides out of it & left the harmless figure. He said he would not have beggars voting industrious people’s money away, & so he compelled the adoption of a cash qualification to vote. He surrounded himself with an obsequious royal Cabinet of American & other foreigners, & he dictated his measures to them &, through them, to his Parliament; & the latter institution opposed them respectfully, not to say apologetically, & passed them.
This is but a sad kind of royal “figure-head.” He was not a fool. He was a wise sovereign; he had seen something of the world; he was educated & accomplished, & he tried hard to do well by his people, & succeeded. There was no trivial royal nonsense about him; he dressed plainly, poked about Honolulu, night or day, on his old horse, unattended; he was popular, greatly respected, & even beloved. Perhaps the only man who never feared him was “Prince Bill,” whom I have mentioned heretofore. Perhaps the only man who ever ventured to speak his whole mind about the King, in Parliament & on the hustings, was the present true heir to the throne—if Prince Bill is still alive, & I have not heard that he is dead. This go-ahead young fellow used to handle His Majesty without gloves, & wholly indifferent to consequences; & being a shade more popular with the native masses than the King himself, perhaps, his opposition amounted to something. The foregoing was the common talk of Honolulu six years ago, & I set the statements down here because I believe them to be true, & not because I know them to be true.
Prince William is about 35 years of age, now, I should think. There is no blood relationship between him & the house of the Kamehamehas. He comes of an older & prouder race; a race of imperious chiefs & princes of the Island of Maui, who held undisputed sway there during several hundred years. He is the eleventh prince in the direct descent, & the natives always paid a peculiar homage to his venerable nobility, which they never vouchsafed to the mushroom Kamehamehas. He is considered the true heir to the Hawaiian throne, for this reason, viz.: A dying or retiring king can name his own successor, by the law of the land—he can name any child of his he pleases, or he can name his brother or any other member of the royal family. The late king has passed away without leaving son, daughter, brother, uncle, nephew, or father (his father never was king—he died a year or two ago), & without appointing a successor. The Parliament has power now to elect a king, & this king can be chosen from any one of the twelve chief families. This has been my understanding of the matter, & I am very sure I am right. In rank, Prince William overtops any chief in the Islands about as an English royal duke overtops a mere earl. He is the only Hawaiian, outside of the royal family, who is entitled to bear & transmit the title of Prince; & he is so popular that if the scepter were put to a popular vote he would “walk over the track.”
He used to be a very handsome fellow, with a truly princely deportment, drunk or sober; but I merely speak figuratively—he never was drunk; he did not hold enough. All his features were fine, & he had a Roman nose that was a model of beauty & grandeur. He was brim full of spirit, pluck & enterprise; his head was full of brains, & his speech was facile & all alive with point & vigor; there was nothing underhanded or two-faced about him, but he always went straight at everything he undertook, without caring who saw his hand or understood his game. He was a potent friend of America & Americans. Such is the true heir to the vacant throne—if he is not dead, as I said before.
I have suggested that William drinks. That is not an objection to a Sandwich Islander. Whisky cannot hurt them; it can seldom even tangle the legs or befog the brains of a practiced native. It is only water with a flavor to it, to Prince Bill; it is what cider is to us. Poi is the all-powerful agent that protects the lover of whisky. Whoever eats it habitually may imbibe habitually without serious harm. The late king & his late sister Victoria both drank unlimited whisky, & so would the rest of the natives if they could get it. The native beverage, awa, is so terrific that mere whisky is foolishness to it. It turns a man’s skin to white fish-scales that are so tough a dog might bite him, & he would not know it till he read about it in the papers. It is made of a root of some kind. The “quality” drink this to some extent, but the Excise law has placed it almost beyond the reach of the plebeians. After awa, what is whisky?
Many years ago the late King & his brother visited California, & some Sacramento folks thought it would be fun to get them drunk. So they gathered together the most responsible soakers in the town & began to fill up royalty & themselves with strong brandy punches. At the end of two or three hours the citizens were all lying torpid under the table & the two princes were sitting disconsolate & saying what a lonely, dry country it was! I tell it to you as it was told to me in Sacramento.
The Hawaiian Parliament consists of half a dozen chiefs, a few whites, & perhaps thirty or forty common Kanakas. The King’s ministers (half a dozen whites) sit with them & ride over all opposition to the King’s wishes. There are always two people speaking at once—the member & the public translator. The little legislature is as proud of itself as any parliament could be, & puts on no end of airs. The wisdom of a Kanaka legislature is as profound as that of our ordinary run of State legislatures, but no more so. Perhaps God makes all legislatures alike in that respect. I remember one Kanaka bill that struck me: it proposed to connect the islands of Oahu & Hawaii with a suspension bridge, because the sea voyage between these points was attended with so much sea-sickness that the natives were greatly discommoded by it. This suspension bridge would have been 150 miles long!
I can imagine what is going on in Honolulu now, during this month of mourning, for I was there when the late King’s sister, Victoria, died. David Kalakaua (a chief), Commander-in-Chief of the Household Troops (how is that, for a title?) is no doubt standing guard now over the closed entrances to the “palace” grounds, keeping out all whites but officers of State; & within, the Christianized heathen are howling & dancing & wailing & carrying on in the same old savage fashion that obtained before Cook discovered the country. I lived three blocks from the wooden two-story palace when Victoria was being lamented, & for thirty nights in succession the mourning pow-wow defied sleep. All that time the christianized but morally unclean Princess lay in state in the palace. I got into the grounds one night & saw some hundreds of half-naked savages of both sexes beating their dismal tom-toms, & wailing & caterwauling in the weird glare of innumerable torches; & while a great band of women swayed & jiggered their pliant bodies through the intricate movements of a lascivious dance called the hula-hula, they chanted an accompaniment in native words. I asked the son of a missionary what the words meant. He said they celebrated certain admired gifts & physical excellencies of the dead princess. I inquired further, but he said the words were too foul for translation; that the bodily excellencies were unmentionable; that the capabilities so lauded & so glorified had better be left to the imagination. He said the King was doubtless sitting where he could hear these ghastly praises & enjoy them. That is, the late King—the educated, cultivated Kamehameha V. And mind you, one of his titles was “the Head of the Church;” for, although he was brought up in the religion of the missionaries, & educated in their schools & colleges, he early learned to despise their plebeian form of worship, & had imported the English system & an English bishop, & bossed the works himself. You can imagine the saturnalia that is making the night hideous in the palace grounds now, where His Majesty is lying in state.
The late King was frequently on hand in the royal pew in the Royal Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, on Sundays; but whenever he got into trouble he did not fly to the cross for help—he flew to the heathen gods of his ancestors. Now this was a man who would write you a beautiful letter, in a faultless hand, & word it in faultless English; & perhaps throw in a few graceful classic allusions; & perhaps a few happy references to science, international law, or the world’s political history; or he would array himself in elegant evening dress & entertain you at his board in princely style, & converse like a born Christian gentleman; & day after day he would work like a beaver in affairs of State, & on occasion exchange autograph letters with the kings & emperors of the old world. And the very next week, business being over, he would retire to a cluster of dismal little straw-thatched native huts by the sea-shore, & there for a fortnight he would turn himself into a heathen whom you could not tell from his savage grandfather. He would reduce his dress to a breech-clout, fill himself daily full of whisky, & sit with certain of his concubines while others danced the peculiar hula-hula. And if oppressed by great responsibilities he would summon one of his familiars, an ancient witch, & ask her to tell him the opinion & the commands of the heathen gods, & these commands he would obey. He was so superstitious that he would not step over a line drawn across a road, but would walk around it. These matters were common talk in the Islands. I never saw this King but once, & then he was not on his periodical debauch. He was in evening dress attending the funeral of his sister, & had a yard of crape depending from his stove-pipe hat.
If you will be so good as to remember that the population of the islands is but a little over 50,000 souls, & that over that little handful of people roosts a monarchy with its coat-tails fringed with as many mighty-titled dignitaries as would suffice to run the Russian Empire, you will wonder how, the offices all being filled, there can be anybody left to govern. And the truth is, that it is one of the oddest things in the world to stumble on a man there who has no title. I felt so lonesome, as being about the only unofficial person in Honolulu, that I had to leave the country to find company.
After all this exhibition of imperial grandeur, it is humiliating to have to say that the entire exports of the kingdom are not as much as $1,500,000, the imports in the neighborhood of that figure, & the revenues, say $500,000. And yet they pay the King $36,000 a year, & the other officials from $3,000 to $8,000—& heaven knows there are enough of them.
The National Debt was $150,000 when I was there—& there was nothing in the country they were so proud of. They would n’t have taken any money for it. With what an air His Excellency the Minister of Finance lugged in his Annual Budget & read off the impressive items & flourished the stately total!
The “Royal Ministers” are natural curiosities. They are white men of various nationalities, who have wandered thither in times gone by. I will give you a specimen—but not the most favorable. Harris, for instance. Harris is an American—a long-legged, vain, light-weight village lawyer from New-Hampshire. If he had brains in proportion to his legs, he would make Solomon seem a failure; if his modesty equaled his ignorance, he would make a violet seem stuck-up; if his learning equaled his vanity, he would make von Humboldt seem as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone; if his stature were proportioned to his conscience, he would be a gem for the microscope; if his ideas were as large as his words, it would take a man three months to walk around one of them; if an audience were to contract to listen as long as he would talk, that audience would die of old age; & if he were to talk until he said something, he would still be on his hind legs when the last trump sounded. And he would have cheek enough to wait till the disturbance was over, & go on again.
Such is (or was) His Excellency Mr. Harris, his late Majesty’s Minister of This, That, & The Other—for he was a little of everything; & particularly & always he was the King’s most obedient humble servant & loving worshiper, & his chief champion & mouthpiece in the parliamentary branch of ministers. And when a question came up (it did n’t make any difference what it was), how he would rise up & saw the air with his bony flails, & storm & cavort & hurl sounding emptiness which he thought was eloquence, & discharge bile which he fancied was satire, & issue dreary rubbish which he took for humor, & accompany it with contortions of his undertaker countenance which he believed to be comic expression!
He began in the islands as a little, obscure lawyer, & rose (?) to be such a many-sided official grandee that sarcastic folk dubbed him, “the wheels of the Government.” He became a great man in a pigmy land—he was of the caliber that other countries construct constables & coroners of. I do not wish to seem prejudiced against Harris, & I hope that nothing I have said will convey such an impression. I must be an honest historian, & to do this in the present case I have to reveal the fact that this stately figure, which looks so like a Washington monument in the distance, is nothing but a thirty-dollar windmill when you get close to him.
Harris loves to proclaim that he is no longer an American, & is proud of it; that he is a Hawaiian through & through, & is proud of that, too; & that he is a willing subject & servant of his lord & master, the King, & is proud & grateful that it is so.
Now, let us annex the islands. Think how we could build up that whaling trade! {Though under our courts & judges it might soon be as impossible for whaleships to rendezvous there without being fleeced & “pulled” by sailors & pettifoggers as it now is in San Francisco—a place the skippers shun as they would rocks & shoals.} Let us annex. We could make sugar enough there to supply all America, perhaps, & the prices would be very easy with the duties removed. And then we would have such a fine half-way house for our Pacific-plying ships; & such a convenient supply depot & such a commanding sentry-box for an armed squadron; & we could raise cotton & coffee there & make it pay pretty well, with the duties off & capital easier to get at. And then we would own the mightiest volcano on earth—Kilauea! Barnum could run it—he understands fires now. Let us annex, by all means. We could pacify Prince Bill & other nobles easily enough—put them on a reservation. Nothing pleases a savage like a reservation—a reservation where he has his annual hoes, & Bibles & blankets to trade for powder & whisky—a sweet Arcadian retreat fenced in with soldiers. By annexing, we would get all those 50,000 natives cheap as dirt, with their morals & other diseases thrown in. No expense for education—they are already educated; no need to convert them—they are already converted; no expense to clothe them—for obvious reasons.
We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise & beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers & Government defaulters, & show them how amusing it is to arrest them & try them & then turn them loose—some for cash & some for “political influence.” We can make them ashamed of their simple & primitive justice. We can do away with their occasional hangings for murder, & let them have Judge Pratt to teach them how to save imperiled Avery-assassins to society. We can give them some Barnards to keep their money corporations out of difficulties. We can give them juries composed entirely of the most simple & charming leatherheads. We can give them railway corporations who will buy their Legislatures like old clothes, & run over their best citizens & complain of the corpses for smearing their unpleasant juices on the track. In place of harmless & vaporing Harris, we can give them Tweed. We can let them have Connolly; we can loan them Sweeny; we can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable. We can confer Woodhull & Claflin on them. And George Francis Train. We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.
We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, & array it in the moral splendor of our high & holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. “Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”
Hartford, Jan. 6, 1873