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acting correctly ; for foreigners, whom he and his chiefs had treated 

 with every possible attention, had, from interested motives, urged 

 measures upon him which he knew to be wrong, and had, in many 

 cases, abused the confidence he had placed in them. He expressed 

 the strongest desire to do right, and to protect his people from evil 

 influences and the encroachments of designing persons, by wholesome 

 laws and regulations. 



The treaty which he had been compelled to sign by Captain La- 

 place, of the French frigate Artemise, was alluded to by him in terms 

 of mortification : he regretted that he had done an act and yielded to 

 a measure which had rendered nugatory his municipal laws and 

 regulations. 



To explain this part of the conversation, it will be necessary to 

 relate some particulars of the circumstances which led to this inter- 

 ference of a French commander with the laws and ordinances of a 

 weak, and, as I think it will appear clearly, an unoffending people. 



There has always been a party among the foreign residents op- 

 posed to the improvements which are taking place in the morals and 

 habits of the Hawaiian people under the influence of the missiona- 

 ries. My position enabled me to hear the statements of both parties, 

 and although the heat of the dispute had in some degree abated, 

 mutual complaints were still made. By a comparison of the two 

 statements, the truth does not appear difficult to be reached. 



The party opposed to the missionaries were anxious to counteract 

 the influence they ascribe to them ; and for this purpose, when they 

 saw the old heathen practices and vicious habits of the people rapidly 

 vanishing, bethought themselves of the Roman Catholic priests, and 

 seem to have desired to excite a sectarian war as one of the most 

 effectual means of opposing the progress of the Protestaut missionary 

 cause. For this purpose they held out inducements to those priests 

 to enter and establish themselves in the Hawaiian territory. This 

 was in direct defiance of the law, which had made the Protestant the 

 established and solely tolerated religion of the state. 



This principle, by which all forms of worship except one were 

 excluded, seems to have been adopted by the king and chiefs, in the 

 belief that two creeds would have tended to distract the minds of the 

 people, and produce contention and confusion. What share the mis- 

 sionaries had in bringing them to this conclusion, I found it impossible 

 clearly to ascertain ; but by information obtained from those best 

 informed on the subject, I was satisfied that the accounts of the 

 persecutions undergone by Catholic converts, and of the cruelties 



