Hutchinson. — 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 a 

 constitution. This was abrogated by Kamehameha V. and a new one 



