Be that as it may, a visit to the Bishop Museum would quickly contradict the primer. There the array of weapons shows that the natives were not only barbarous but savage. This is no serious condemnation, for none of Europe's races can show any cleaner record. Arts, indeed, the Hawaiians had, and sense of form and color. An apron of feathers worn by the king required a tax of a feather apiece on hundreds of birds. After this feather was extracted, the bird was set free, an indication of thrift if not kindliness. Yet they did not hesitate to strip the flesh off every bone of Captain Cook and distribute portions among the native chiefs. No one has proved that they ate it; but cannibalism is, after all, a relative vice and was not unknown in northwestern Europe.
5
The passing of the Hawaiians, like that of many other races in the Pacific, is due to a cannibalism and a barbarism which are less emphasized in the ordinary discussions of the problem. There are more ways than one of eating your neighbor. However harrowing that savage diet was, it did not work for the destruction of any of these South Sea islanders as ruthlessly as did the practice among the Hawaiians of infanticide. Mothers were in the habit of disposing of their impetuous children by the simple method of burying them alive, frequently under the very shelter of their roofs, lying down upon the selfsame floor and sleeping the sleep of the just with the tiny infant squirming in its grave beside them. Parents were not allowed to have more than a given number of children because of the strain on the available food supply. This more than anything else depleted the number of natives most disastrously. But in addition came the white man with his diseases, contagious and infectious,—a form of destruction that, from the native point of view, is quite as dastardly as eating the flesh of the vanquished.
Certainly, whatever the viciousness of the occasional or annual outbursts of passion among these primitive folk, there was no example of regulated, insistent pandering to vice such as has been set them by the Europeans, especially in Hawaii. There one evening I wandered through the very depths of degradation; there I witnessed a process of fusion of races which had only one possible end,—extinction. Its Hawaiian name had a strange similarity to the word evil: it is Iwilei. McDuffie, Chief of Detectives of Honolulu, was making his inspection of medical certificates, which was part of the work of "restriction," and took me with him.
Mr. McDuffie had been standing near the window of the outer office, with one foot upon a chair, talking to another detective, when I called out his name. Tall, massive, with hair almost gray, a rather kindly face, he looked me up and down without moving. I explained my mission.
"Who are you?" he asked bluntly.
A mean question, always asked by the white man in the tropics. Well, now, who in thunder was I, anyway? I murmured that I was a "writer." "Be round at seven-thirty, and you can come along," he said dryly.
On his office walls hung hatchets, daggers, pistols, sabers, and many other such toys of a barbarous world hacking away against or toward perfection. On the floor were dozens of opium pipes, taken in a raid upon Chinese dens,—toys of another kind of world trying to forget its progress away from barbarism. One Japanese continued his game of cards nonchalantly. Flash-lights were in evidence, fearlessly protruding from hip pockets.
At half-past seven I was there again. As we were about to enter the motor-car, I ventured some remark, thinking to make conversation. "Get in there," said the chief, abruptly. For an instant he must have thought he was taking a criminal to confinement.
Zigzagging our way through the streets and across the river, we entered an unlighted thoroughfare, hardly to be called a street. A steady stream of straggling shadows moved along like spirits upon the banks of the river Styx. Our way opened out upon a lighted section, crowded with negro soldiers and civilians of all nationalities. Here, then, and not only beyond the grave, class and distinction and race dissolve. A perfect hubbub of conversation, soda fountains and plain noise, and reeling of drunkies. A futurist conception of confusion would do it justice. We were at the gates of Babylon.