LETTER XVIII.] 



A PERISHING NATION. 



177 



merits of his once athletic and vigorous youth. Nor can I 

 divest myself of the idea that the laughing, flower-clad hordes 

 of riders who make the town gay with their presence, are 

 hut like butterflies fluttering out their short lives in the sun- 

 shine, 



" . . . a wreck and residue, 

 "Whose only business is to perish." 



The statistics on this subject are perfectly appalling. If we 

 reduce Captain Cook's estimate of the native population by 

 one-fourth it was 300,000 in 1779. In 1872 it was only 

 49,000. The first official census was in 1832, when the native 

 population was 130,000. This makes the decrease 80,000 in 

 forty years, or at the rate of 2000 a year, and fixes the period 

 for the final extinction of the race in 1897, if that rate were to 

 continue. It is a pity, for many reasons, that it is dying 

 out. It has shown a singular aptitude for politics and 

 civilization, and it would have been interesting to watch the 

 development of a strictly Polynesian monarchy starting under 

 passably fair conditions. Whites have conveyed to these shores 

 slow but infallible destruction on the one hand, and on the 

 other the knowledge of the life that is to come; and the rival 

 influences of blessing and cursing have now been fifty years at 

 work, producing results with which most reading people are 

 familiar. 



I have not heard the subject spoken of, but I should think 

 that the decrease in the population must cause the burden of 

 taxation to press heavily on that which remains. Kings, 

 cabinet ministers, an army, a police, a national debt, a supreme 

 court, and common schools, are costly luxuries or necessaries. 

 The civil list is ludicrously out of proportion to the resources 

 of the islands, and the heads of the four departments — Foreign 

 Relations, Interior, Finance, and Law (Attorney-General) — 

 receive $5000 a year each ! * Expenses and salaries have been 

 increasing for the last thirty years. For schools alone every 

 man between twenty-one and sixty pays a tax of two dollars 

 annually, and there is an additional general tax for the same 

 purpose. I suppose that there is not a better educated country 

 in the world. Education is compulsory ; and besides the pri- 

 mary schools, there are a number of academies, all under Go- 

 vernment supervision, and there are 324 teachers, or one for 



* These salaries have since been cut down to $4000, and the present 

 Legislature (1876) is contemplating a further reduction. 



