The Portuguese form quite a distinct element in the community. It is curious, in discussing races in Hawaii, to hear “Portuguese and White” written and spoken of. The fact that there are a number of families of the Cape Verde or black Portuguese type in Hawaii has tended to differentiate the Portuguese as a whole.
Their presence here is wholly artificial, brought about by the assisted immigration program of the Sugar Planters’ Association; and they are the favorite workers on the best plantations. Once a Portuguese decides to remain in the country he loses no time in acquiring literally his own “vine and fig tree.”
This nationality shows the strongest contrasts of any in Honolulu, being at once the most thrifty, the largest alms-asking, the most efficient working and most hopelessly offending child laboring and school evading element in the population. A logical explanation is offered by their Consul who lays the blame for the mendicancy on the Portuguese nabobs who became millionaires by exploiting the natives in Brazil, and then returned to their own country and made their peace with God by endowing Portugal with every sort of eleemosynary institution possible to create.
Their thrift is the result of the habit of work centuries old, while the ingrained habit which fathers of all civilized nations have of raising large families and retiring from work to live on their children’s earnings at the earliest feasible time is one of the principal factors everywhere in making child labor laws a necessity. Not until there are sufficient school accommodations in Honolulu will the truant officer have an adequate basis for enforcing the compulsory school attendance law.
The girls and women are well liked by employers. They are reserved and have a hint of melancholy in their temperament which is quite foreign to other workers in Honolulu.
Portuguese families are almost a rarity in the tenement houses. The meanest sort of cottage is preferred by them, where they may cultivate their own vegetables and raise their own chickens.
While the majority of the immigrants came from the same social class, many nice distinctions have sprung up with the passing of years and the acquiring of new standards, and it is therefore impossible to characterize the Portuguese population or even the Portuguese wage-earners in Honolulu as a whole, with anything like the definiteness distinguishing the workers of other races.
TEACHERS.
Honolulu’s teaching force, like its population, includes representatives of the four corners of the earth:
| American | 100 |
| Hawaiian or Part Hawaiian | 32 |
| British | 10 |
| Chinese | 7 |
| Portuguese | 6 |
| German | 1 |
| Japanese | 1 |
| Other Foreigners | 6 |
| 163 |