Hurcumwson.—Hawaii-nei and the Hawaiians. 469 
Their success was, from their own point of view, wonderful and unpre- 
cedented. In a few years churches and schools marked every village, 
the natives were nominally christians, the old superstitions hidden out of 
sight and supposed to be extinguished and the language was reduced to 
. writing. Then a Catholic Mission appeared and was forced upon the king 
and people by a French man-of-war. A painful conflict between the two 
faiths took place. This gradually subsided ; a large portion of the natives 
adopted the newer faith, its spectacular ritual appearing to suit them far 
better than the other, while the singularly self-devoted and humble lives of 
the priests have largely aided in the same direction. Now the two live 
peacefully side by side. There is no religious census of the islands ; but, 
to hazard a rough guess, perhaps a third of the natives are Catholics, and 
the proportion increases. 
The Protestant missionaries quickly acquired important political powers. 
They stood out as the protectors of the natives against the vice and selfishness 
of the white traders. One, Dr. Judd, a man of great ability, was for many 
years the head of the government. The native kings, able men themselves, 
gladly availed themselves of the superior knowledge of the foreigners. Had 
these white men been English, no doubt the islands would have become an 
English colony. As it was, they were seized and annexed by Lord George 
Paulet, commanding an English man-of-war, an act quickly disavowed by 
the English Government. Colonies are outside of the American political 
system, and the great aim of the white ministers was not to annex the 
islands to America, but to build them up into an independent sovereignty 
under the native king. It is a fair question whether it would not have been 
better for the natives had the islands become a British Crown Colony; the 
decay of the race, it has been thought, might have been less rapid. But 
looking to the history of the Maoris and Fijians, the soundness of such an 
opinion may be greatly doubted. The lecturer had not been able to dis- 
cover that the two last races are better off than the first; as to the value of 
the work—religious, political and social—of the missionaries in the islands 
there are such wide diversities of opinion that the lecturer declined to enter 
upon a ground of such hot controversy. Being human the missionaries 
could not, with all their good intentions, avoid errors, and many of them 
would now confess that their errors were many and serious. They were 
misled by thinking that they had a force at their back strong enough to 
change human nature and turn a half-savage native into the highest class 
of New Englander. 
The land tenure and political system was at first feudal, but in 1839 
Kamehameha III. abolished the feudal tenures and gave the country & 
constitution. This was abrogated by Kamehameha V. and a new one 
