Of the foreigners the Chinese are the most numerous, outnumbering all the other foreign nationalities together except the Americans. Chinese have been brought over here as coolie laborers on the plantations. They readily intermarry with the native women, and these unions are usually fruitful of healthy and bright children. It is said that the Chinese insist upon taking better care of their children than the native women, uninstructed, usually give them, and that therefore the Chinese half-caste families are more thrifty than those of the pure blood Hawaiians. Moreover, the Chinaman takes care of his wife. He endeavors to form her habits upon the pattern of his own; and requires of her the performance of fixed duties, which add to her happiness and health. In fact, the number of half-castes of all races has increased thirty per cent. in the last six years.
The native population is admirably cared for by the authorities. The Islands are divided for various governmental purposes into districts; and in every district where the people are much scattered the government places a physician—a man of skill and character—to whom it gives a small salary for attending upon the common people, and he is, I believe, expected to make a tour of his district at stated intervals. Of course he is allowed to practice besides for pay. The sugar planters also usually provide medical attendance for their laborers.
The Government maintains a careful guard over the schools. A compulsory education law obliges parents, under fixed penalties, to send their children to school; and besides the common or primary schools, there are a number of academies, most of which receive some help from the Government, while all are under Government supervision. The census gives the number of children between six and fifteen years of age at 6931; and there are 324 teachers, or one teacher for every twenty-seven children in the whole group. Attendance at school is, I suspect, more general here than in any other country in the world. The last report of W.P. Kamakau, the President of the Board of Education, made in March, 1872, returns 8287 children actually attending upon 245 schools of various grades, 202 being common schools. Under this system there is scarcely a Hawaiian of proper age who can not both read and write.
Churches they maintain by voluntary effort, and their contributions are very liberal. They take a pride in such organizations. Dr. Coan's native church at Hilo contributes $1200 per year to foreign missions.
There are no beggars, and no public paupers except the insane, who are cared for in an asylum near Honolulu, and the lepers, who are confined upon a part of Molokai. The convicts and the boys in the reform school contribute to their own support by their labor. The Queen's Hospital is only for curable cases, and the people take care of their own infirm, aged and otherwise incapable dependents.
It seems to me that very unusual judgment has been shown in the manner in which benevolent and penal institutions have been created and managed among these people; for the tendency almost everywhere in countries which call themselves more highly civilized is to make the poor dependent upon charity, and thus a fatal blow is struck at their character and respectability. Here, partly of course because the means of living are very abundant and easily got, but also, I think, because the government has been wisely managed, the people have not been taught to look toward public charity for relief; and though we Americans, who live in a big country, are apt to think slightingly of what some one called a toy kingdom, any one who has undertaken to manage or organize even a small community at home will recognize the fact that it is a task beset by difficulties.
But in these Islands a state, a society, has been created within a quarter of a century, and it has been very ably done. I am glad that it has been done mainly by Americans. Chief-justice Lee, now dead, but whose memory is deservedly cherished here; Dr. Judd, who died in August, 1873; Mr. C.C. Harris, lately Minister of Foreign Relations, and for many years occupying different prominent positions in the Government; Dr. J. Mott Smith, lately the Minister of Finance; Chief-justice Allen, and Mr. Armstrong, long at the head of the Educational Department, the father of General Armstrong, President of the Hampton University in Virginia, deserve, perhaps, the chief credit for this work. They were the organizers who supplemented the labors of the missionaries; and, fortunately for the native people, they were all men of honor, of self-restraint, of goodness of heart, who knew how to rule wisely and not too much, and who protected the people without destroying their independence. What they have done would have given them fame had it not been done two thousand miles from the nearest continent, and at least five thousand from any place where reputations are made.
Of a total native population of 51,531, 6580 are returned by the census as freeholders—more than one in every eight. Only 4772 are returned as plantation laborers, and of these probably a third are Chinese; 2115 returned themselves as mechanics, which is a very large proportion of the total able-bodied population. I believe that both freeholders and mechanics find employment on the plantations as occasional laborers.
A people so circumstanced, well taught in schools, freeholders to a large extent, living in a mild and salubrious climate, and with cheap and proper food, ought not, one would say, to decrease. There are, of course, several reasons for their very rapid decrease, and all of them come from contact with the whites. These brought among them diseases which have corrupted their blood, and made them infertile and of poor stamina. But to this, which is the chief cause, must be added, I suspect, another less generally acknowledged.
The deleterious habit of wearing clothes has, I do not doubt, done much to kill off the Hawaiian people. If you think for a moment, you will see that to adopt civilized habits was for them to make a prodigious change in their ways of life. Formerly the maro and the slight covering of the tapa alone shielded them from the sun and rain. Their bodies became hardy by exposure. Their employments—fishing, taro-planting, tapa-making, bird-catching, canoe-making—were all laborious, and pursued out-of-doors. Their grass houses, with openings for doors and windows, were, at any rate, tolerably well ventilated. Take the man accustomed thus to live, and put shoes on his feet, a hat on his head, a shirt on his back, and trowsers about his legs, and lodge him in a house with close-shutting doors and windows, and you expose his constitution to a very serious strain, especially in a country where there is a good deal of rain. Being, after all, but half civilized, he will probably sleep in a wet shirt, or cumber his feet with wet shoes; he will most likely neglect to open his windows at night, and poison himself and his family with bad air, to the influence of which, besides, his unaccustomed lungs will be peculiarly liable; he will live a less active life under his changed conditions; and altogether the poor fellow must have an uncommonly fine constitution to resist it all and escape with his life. At the best, his system will be relaxed, his power of resistance will be lessened, his chances of recovery will be diminished in the same degree as his chances of falling ill are increased. If now you throw in some special disease, corrupting the blood, and transmitted with fatal certainty to the progeny, the wonder is that a people so situated have not died out in a single generation.