The Hawaiian people, when they first became known to the world, were several stages removed from mere savagery. They had elaborated a tolerably perfect system of government and of land tenure, which has since been swept away, as was inevitable, but which served its day very well indeed. Under this system the chiefs owned every thing. The common people were their retainers—followers in war and servants in peace. The chief, according to an old Hawaiian proverb, owned "all the land, all the sea, and all the iron cast up by the sea."
The land was carefully parceled out among the chiefs, upon the plan of securing to each one from his own land all that he and his retainers needed for their lives. What they chiefly required was taro ground, the sea for fish, the mulberry for tapa, and timber land for canoes; but they required also ti leaves in which to wrap their parcels, and flowers of which to make their les, or flower necklaces. And I have seen modern surveys of old "lands" in which the lines were run very irregularly, and in some cases oven outlying patches were added, because a straight line from mountain to sea was found to exclude some one product, even so trifling as the yellow flowers of which les are often made.
On such a "land," and from it, the chief and his people lived. He appears to have been the brains and they the hands to work it. They owed him two days' labor in every seven, in which they cultivated his taro, cleaned his fish pond, caught fish for him, opened paths, made or transported canoes, and did generally what he required. The remainder of the time was their own, to cultivate such patches of taro as he allowed them to occupy, or to do what they pleased. For any important public work he could call out all his people, and oblige them to labor as long as he chose, and thus were built the surprisingly solid and extensive walls which inclose the old fish ponds, and many irrigating canals which show not only long continued industry, but quite astonishing skill for so rude a people.
The chief was supreme ruler over his people; they lived by his tolerance, for they owned absolutely nothing, neither land, nor house, nor food, nor wife, nor child. A high chief was approached only with abject gestures, and no one dared resist his acts or dispute his will. The sense of obedience must have been very strong, for it has survived every change; and only the other day a friend of mine saw a Hawaiian lady, a chiefess, but the wife of an American, and herself tenderly nurtured and a woman of education and refinement, boxing the ears of a tall native, whom she had caught furiously abusing his wife, and the man bore his punishment as meekly as a child. "Why?" "He knows I am his chief, and he would not dare raise even an angry look toward me; he would not think of it, even," was her reply, when she was asked how she had courage to interfere in what was a very violent quarrel. Yet the present law recognizes no allegiance due to a chief.
When the young king Lunalilo returned to the palace after the coronation, the pipe-bearer, an old native retainer, approached him on his knees, and was shocked at being ordered to get up and act like a man. The older natives to this day approach a chief or chiefess only with humble and deprecatory bows; and wherever a chief or chiefess travels, the native people along the road make offerings of the fruits of the ground, and even of articles of clothing and adornment. One of the curious sights of Honolulu to us travelers, last spring, was to see long processions of native people, men, women, and children, marching to the palace to lay their offerings before the king, who is a high chief. Each brought something—a man would walk gravely along with a pig under his arm; after him followed perhaps a little child with half a dozen bananas, a woman with a chicken tied by a string, a girl with a handkerchief full of eggs, a boy with a cocoa-nut, an old woman with a calabash of poi, and so on. In the palace yard all this was laid in a heap before the young king, who thereupon said thank you, and, with a few kind words, dismissed the people to their homes.
As an illustration of the power of the old chiefs, as well as of the density of the population in former times, it is related that when the wall inclosing a certain fish pond on the windward side of Oahu was to be built, the chief then ruling over that land gave notice that on a certain day every man, woman, and child within his domain must appear at a designated point, bearing a stone. The wall, which stands yet, is half a mile long, well built, and probably six feet high; and it was begun and completed in that one day.
