CHAPTER XXIV.

MISSIONARY ACHIEVEMENT AND FAILURE.

HRISTIANITY has now been on its trial in Hawaii

for forty years. During all that time, its exponents have been United States missionaries of the Congregational or Independent denomination. For a quarter of a century the Church of Rome has also had a footing in the islands, and during the last ten years has proselytized with activity, and greatly extended the cords of her tent. The Roman Church, however, dwells in lands foreign to the sway of the Pope, as a body of exiles,―or, rather, as a religious clique, differing somewhat in form, under the atmospheric pressure of Protestant opinion, from the perfect development she exhibits in lands which she calls her own. As she does not exert any direct political influence in the Sandwich Islands, her action is to be regarded rather as a large exception than as an operative rule, and we do not at present concern ourselves, except incidentally, with her communion.

But forty years afford a fair opportunity of observing what life and potentiality there may be in the largest and most forcible form of dissent, unimpeded for the greater part of that time by any rival or antagonist,

and unfettered by any open connection with the State. If the American missionaries have not succeeded in all that they have attempted, or filled the large programme they had sketched, it is nevertheless no small work which they have accomplished in the Hawaiian Archipelago. In an age of immeasurable desires and weak volitions' failure and incompleteness are seen around us at every step and it is with no unfriendly hand that we trace the proceedings of the missionaries, and endeavour to form some estimate of the ultimate effects and capabilities of religion as taught by them and exemplified in their conduct.

We will first listen to their own voice in the summary of their successes given in the Annual Reports of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, published at Boston, Mass., and to the evidence of an impartial observer who lately exercised his intelligent eyes on men and things during two months' wandering through the islands of Hawaii. In recording the impressions of Mr. R. H. Dana, the persons who are responsible for drawing up the above reports have quoted so much of his letters as eulogised the missionaries. We have no right to complain that they omitted further remarks commendatory of the Roman Catholic clergy, and on other important subjects, which would have been unsuitable to the objects of the Report, if not unsatisfactory to the supporters of the mission. To the omitted portions of Mr. Dana's letters we shall have to call attention in the latter part of this chapter.

'Before the introduction of the Gospel,' writes the Report of 1859, 'a feudal despotism held the mass of the people in the most abject bondage. The land all belonged to the King; and all kinds of property, and even life itself, were subject to his

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caprice. Under the benign influence of the Gospel a constitutional monarchy has been introduced. Lands have been divided among chiefs and peoples, and a feesimple title given. A liberal constitution and an enlightened system of laws have been adopted. The lower house of the legislature, which meets biennially, is chosen by the universal suffrage of the people. Regular courts of law are established throughout the Islands, with a supreme court at the metropolis. Life and property are as safe as in any nation of the earth. Taxes are light, and the government is administered on just and economical principles. Industry, comfortable houses, a civilised dress, and the other blessings of civilisation follow in the train of these changes. Foreign aid, of various kinds, is called in to help forward this onward progress; but Christianity has been the foundation and support of all these improvements.'

Claiming for Christianity the material prosperity and advancement of the Islands, the Report of 1860 challenges comparison of their condition in the year 1820 and the fortieth year after. In national finance, the public income, in two years ending the 31st March, 1860, was $655,866, and the expenditure $643,088. The imports in the year 1859 were $1,089,660, and the exports $931,329. The judicial statistics show the convictions. in 1859 to have been 4,007, exhibiting a decrease of 800 on the previous year. Two-thirds of the entire number of persons convicted were for drunkenness, fornication, and adultery; whilst there were only nine convictions for burglary, and a portion of these may have been foreigners. Attention is called to public improvements, viz., the water-supply of Honolulu, the inter-island steamer, the harbour-dredging, &c. Coming to subjects more cognate to the special work of a religious mission, the income raised by the school-tax in 1859 was $31,491.

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More noticeable, perhaps, is the fact that the Hawaiians. are themselves missionaries, and possess a missionary vessel, the Morning Star,' which keeps up communication with the stations established in the Marquesan and Micronesian groups, making occasional visits to other islands. The Marquesan mission is supported by the Hawaiian churches,' which contributed for the purpose $1,918-the total receipts of the Hawaiian Missionary Society being $3,310. The people are liberal in supporting their ministers and edifices,-very liberal considering their small means. At Lahaina the inhabitants of the town had expended $4,341 in rebuilding their meeting-house.

We turn now to Mr. Dana's excerpted remarks, contained in the Mission Report of 1860, and quote the passage of the report which contains them in

extenso :

'It is no small thing to say of the missionaries of the American Board,' says a gentleman who visited the Sandwich Islands the past year, and wrote thence, that in less than forty years they have taught this whole people to read and to write, to cipher and to sew. They have given them an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary; preserved their language from extinction; given it a literature, and translated into it the Bible, and works of devotion, science, and entertainment, &c. They have established schools, reared up native teachers, and so pressed their work that now the proportion of inhabitants who

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ean read and write is greater than in New England; and whereas they found these islanders a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among themselves, tyrannised over by feudal chiefs, and abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decently clothed, recognising the law of marriage, knowing something of accounts, going to school and public worship with more regularity than the people do at home--and the more elevated of them taking part in conducting the affairs of the constitutional monarchy under which they live, holding seats on the judicial bench and in the legislative chambers, and filling posts in the local magistracies.'

The gentleman who writes thus is Richard H. Dana, Esq., a respected member of the Episcopal Church, and of the Boston Bar, who describes himself as, in the two months spent in the Islands, 'the guest of many of the mission families, more or less acquainted with nearly all of them.' After commending their hospitality, intelligence, general information, and solicitude for the education of their children, he says:

'I have seen in their houses collections of minerals, shells, plants, and flowers, which must be valuable to science; and the missionaries have often preserved the best, sometimes the only, records of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other phenomena, and meteorological observations. Besides having given, as I have said, to the native language an alphabet, grammar, distionary, and literature, they have done nearly all that has been done to preserve the national traditions, legends, and poetry. But for the missionaries, it is my firm belief that the Hawaiian would never have been a written language; there would have been few or no trustworthy early records, historical or scientific; the traditions would have perished; the native government would have been overborne by foreign influences: and the interesting, intelligent, gentle race would have sunk into insignificance, and perhaps into servitude to the dominant whites.'

The testimony is so explicit that the Committee make further extracts from the letters of Mr. Dana :

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