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Upper House of the Legislature and to substitute in place thereof an appointive one, to be appointed by the Sovereign.' Americans who are now shouting, 'home rule for Hawaiians' and demanding that the Provisional Government should be approved by a popular vote will do well to remember that the native Hawaiians are not by any means a majority of the population, and that the Queen sought to take the ballot from the hands of white men and confer it solely to her Kanaka brethren.
"NOT OF ROYAL BLOOD.
"It would be well for those to reflect who are now deploring the loss of the deposed Queen's rights to ascertain just what those rights are. She has not a drop of royal blood in her veins, and therefore does not get any of her pretended royal rights by descent. When Kamehameha V expired, December 11, 1872, the royal family became extinct. Then the system of election was resorted to to fill the throne. Lunalilo, one of the high chief class, was elected by a vote of the nobles and representatives. He died in 1874, and then a new election of the sovereign was held by the nobles and representatives. The general supposition was that Queen Emma, the widow of Kamehameha IV, would be elected, but when the election came off Kalakaua captured the Legislature and secured a majority, it was charged at the time, by unfair methods. Riots against Kalakaua followed, and he was only kept on the throne ultimately by the landing of an American force.
"When Kalakaua died, in 1891, he had no heir, and by his will he selected his sister, Liliuokalni, as his successor. Thus the right to the throne by inheritance or by an election was abandoned, and the Queen who was deposed last winter seemed to owe her elevation to the will of her brother, which mode of selection seems to have been acquiesced in at the time. Whether there was any law or change of constitution which authorized a childless sovereign to will away the throne to a relative or not, I do not know. Similarly, however, the deposed Queen has designated as her successor Kaiulani, the daughter of her sister, now 18 years of age, the daughter of Mr. Cleghorn, an Englishman who married one of Kalakaua's sisters and who held office under that King. Kaiulani is now being brought up in England, under the tutelage of Theophilus C. Davies, formerly English consul at Honolulu, and now in business there, and whose son is said to be engaged to marry Kaulani. She visited Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland last winter in company with Davies, and Mrs. Cleveland gave the incipient Queen distinguished consideration. Davies has lately had interviews with Cleveland and Gresham and has returned to Honolulu, proclaiming that Lil will be restored, and here's where 'the English of it' comes in.
"Perhaps one reason why women seem to be the favorite sex for sovereigns, in violation of the Salic law, is because the descent of property in Hawaii is through the female and not the male line. Kalakaua and his sister Lil were of what is known as the high chief class. Their blood was not, therefore, 'royal,' but, so far as inherited, of a very bad kind, for it is a historical fact that their grandfather was the first person ever executed in Hawaii for the murder of his wife.
"A DYING RACE.
"It seems absurd that an American statesman should be willing to commit the future destinies of Hawaii to the rule of the monarchy of a race rapidly dying out, rather than to the vigorous and progressive
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auspices of the American Republic. The native population of Hawaii fell off from 1866 from 57,125 to 31,446 in 1890-a loss of 22,679 in twenty-five years. At that rate of loss the whole native population of Hawaii will be wiped out completely early in the second quarter of the next century, so that the child may now be born who will live to see the entire extinction of the Hawaiian race. This is a startling fact. Yet it seems to be true that in a little more than a century since the discovery of the Hawaiian group by Capt. Cook the population has dwindled from 400,000 to less than one-eleventh of that number. I have not space to give the reasons for this decay of the race, one of the principal of which seems to lie in the fact that the native women generally lack the motherly instinct for the proper care of their children.
"A common custom among Hawaiian mothers is to give away their children at birth, some promising to give them away even before they are born. The mother, for this loss of her offspring, solaces herself often by adopting the child of some other woman as a household pet, after the manner of many American women who prefer pugs to progeny. It is certain that a newer and more virile race is shortly to entirely supersede the aboriginals on these islands. The evolution is now going on with startling rapidity.
"Now that the public lands are about exhausted in America and Hawaii lies contiguous to our own shores, shall the dominant race to be planted there be American or English, or shall the structure of the future be built on the basis of a race, as Cleveland proposes, who will sink out of sight among the 'lost tribes' early in the next century? Statesmen who are statesmen worthy of the name do not build the nation for a day, but for all time. In view of the fact that our Pacific coast will in the near future have a population of 10,000,000 of people, with a vast commerce over the Pacific Ocean, and that this commerce will require protection over that great sea, the reasons for annexation, now that the opportunity offers, are too obvious to need to be recounted here.
"A SETTLED POLICY.
"The students of American history know that in the United States annexation has been the settled policy always. The original American colonies numbered only eleven, including the three counties of Delaware, which were really a part of Pennsylvania, and the number of States remained at eleven for two or three years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1787. The number was swelled to thirteen in 1789 and 1790, when North Carolina and Rhode Island reluctantly came into the Union. The original colonies contained no more than 1,000,000 square miles of territory, a narrow strip of land stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Alleghenies in the West, to the Floridas and Louisiana in the south, and to the northward to Nova Scotia and Canada. All during our earlier history it was a struggle to annex new territory or to protect what we had. The real bottom bone of contention in the war with Great Britain in 1812 was as to which nation should hold the navigation arid mouth of the Mississippi River. In the present century we have made by purchase the following annexations, namely:
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In 1803, Louisiana cost |
$15,000,000 |
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In 1819, Florida |
5,000,000 |
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In 1848, California and New Mexico |
15,000,000 |
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In 1853, Arizona |
10,000,000 |
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In 1867, Alaska |
7,200,000 |
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Total cost of territory purchased |
52,200,000 |