another treaty, drafted in London, was sent to him, very similar to that concluded by the United States. It provides for the mutual reception of national ships of war in all harbours, rivers, and places; restricts import and export duties to the level of the most favoured nation; and provides that the diplomatic agents and consuls of the Hawaiian Islands in the dominions of Her Britannic Majesty shall enjoy whatever privileges, exemptions, and immunities, are or shall be granted there to agents of the same rank belonging to the most favoured nation; with similar enjoyments to the diplomatic and consular agents of Great Britain in the Hawaiian Islands. This treaty is signed on the 10th of July, 1851, and ratifications exchanged on the 6th of May, 1852.

On the 1st of July, 1852, another treaty on the same model was signed in Honolulu, by Captain Virgin, on behalf of the King of Sweden and Norway and of the Goths and Vandals.' It was ratified on the 5th of April, 1855. The only alteration of importance in this compact was in the 15th article, in which it is agreed that

All vessels bearing the flag of Sweden or of Norway in time of war shall receive every possible protection short of actual hostility (sic) within the ports and waters of His Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands; and His Majesty the King of Sweden and Norway engages to respect in time of war the neutral rights of the Hawaiian kingdom, and to use his good offices with all other powers having treaties with His Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands, to induce them to adopt the same policy towards the Hawaiian kingdom.

It is easily seen how greatly to the advantage of the smaller kingdom the foregoing clause was.

Between the signing of the Swedish treaty and the new treaty with France, which bears date the 29th of

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October, 1857, a train of circumstances occurred which it will now be our duty to unravel and give some account of. They are painful and humiliating. A great and powerful nation, set in motion by and acting through its distant agents, bringing its force to bear on a small and defenceless people who in its hands are but as the mouse which a cat dallies with before giving it a coup de grace with its claw, is not a spectacle to be proud of. To know that private feuds and jealousies, private follies and imaginary grievances among governmental and diplomatic officials, led the way to years of real trouble and crises of actual danger to the country in which they occurred, converts the reader's smile of amusement into a frown of impatience and anger. Yet all this was the case. France invaded the territory and the capital of a friendly nation, to vindicate national honour and to protect national interests, when all the while the wrong was to the wounded feelings of her consular agent; and the interests at stake were some difference in rent upon a house the Consul hired near the city. Here was the real Briseis in the Hawaiian Iliad bence the gloomy estrangement of the FrancoHibernian Achilles in Polynesia.

It began to be rumoured that the French treaty was not working well; that France was dissatisfied; and that that great nation felt itself oppressed beyond the powers of endurance by certain clauses of the treaty. First there was subject of language. Why was not French to be used in the diplomacy of Hawaii? To exclude its employment was a pointed insult and wrong done to his sovereignty of France. This ought to be altered. French must be used equally and identically with English; and all French documents must be read, and answers returned to them in the French language, in

6

precisely the same time required for reading and writing in English. The Pourquoi non' argument is one difficult to answer; but a similar right might as well have been claimed on behalf of the Sanskrit, or for the unknown tongue.

The second grievance was, of course, relative to brandy. In the interests of sufficient drinking it was asked, why the government should set their face against regulated intemperance. Unless a moderate intoxication was allowed, how were French interests to be protected? The whole thing was certainly a sham. Abstinence pledges and Dash-away associations were abominations about whose origin we will not enquire, but were certainly directed entirely against the Vignerolles of sunny France.

There were a few subsidiary grounds of quarrel selected, which, like the pleas in a brief after the two first, we hastily read, but do not dwell upon or plead. Such were the management of Roman Catholic schools; impertinent difficulties thrown in the way of the virtuous intercourse between French seamen and Hawaiian females, and a few others; but the battle-field chosen was language and brandy.

A community too small to admit of defined political parties, in which personal antipathies can range themselves on opposite sides, is capable of no more than individual hatred, or, at most, of some irascible cliques. Political virulence is an advantage denied to a very confined society. The state of parties in Honolulu must be judged of as being under these circumstances.

The beginning and course of the quarrel, plainly told, are as follow:-An uncomfortable state of feeling had sprung up within the ministry. Dr. Judd considered that by his patronage Mr. Wyllie was helped into office, and

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now growing jealous of his protégé, he would willingly have assisted him to vacate his post. Mr. Dillon, an Irishman by parentage, but born in France, had replaced M. Dudoit as French Consul. Mr. Wyllie having been a friend of Dudoit's, was, by a sort of necessary antithesis, disliked by his successor in the consulate. To the immediate antipathy which Mr. Dillon felt towards the foreign minister, he added a national jealousy of English influence. With these mixed feelings he composed a remarkable letter addressed to Dr. Judd, dated the 11th of August, 1848, and which was afterwards produced to the privy council and printed. In this letter are found many sarcastic and disparaging remarks on Mr. Wyllie, who, as Dillon suggested, was endeavouring to undermine Dr. Judd, and uproot American influence around the King; and what was perhaps still worse for all parties, Mr. Wyllie was misrepresenting everything said and written by Dillon, as in the case of the ratification of the French treaty;' he was conspiring against Dillon personally; and had joined with Dudoit in organising dark and foolish intrigues both in London and Paris to the advantage of the latter.' Upon these and other grounds, among which the rent and furniture of a house are obscurely mixed, Mr. Dillon makes the proposal to Dr. Judd to murder (politically) Mr. Wyllie. And the text which is to justify this proposition is a French proverb which says, 'When the devil attempts to kill you, be beforehand with him, and kill the devil, -if you can.' Mr. Dillon is a diplomatist and a philosopher. He knows what state necessities are, and what a diversity of tricks and courses men in office, even the purest, may stumble into. He is, therefore, full of indulgence.' But he wishes to disabuse Dr. Judd of one erroneous impression, viz., that the Sandwich

Islands are a kind of little plum-pudding which France is anxious to stick her fork into, and that he (Dillon), is the destined instrument of this carving.'

Now, letters of this kind are dangerous. They were particularly so in the case we are narrating; for in the first place, the communication fell into the hands of Mr. Wyllie himself, and it did not tend to improve the writer's place in his estimation; and, secondly, it failed to convert Dr. Judd into the conspirator which was intended, but had another effect, that of making him most hungry to know what machinations were being plotted against himself; so that the letter, missing its mark, was like a narcotic, which, if it fail to produce sleep, makes the patient doubly restless.

Dr. Judd, eager to make discoveries in the cabal, directed, as he puts it, against the government (for as he considered himself inseparable from government, any wrong to himself was an injury to the powers that be), -committed the serious indiscretion of bribing one Peacock, a printer, to abstract some MSS. from the office of the newspaper in opposition to the native government. The act was more detestable than a crime, it was a blunder. It immediately placed all the foreign representatives in arms; they entered their protest to the King against the unscrupulous minister of finance, and proceeded to a step opposed to all international propriety, that of advising the King to dismiss his ministers.

To Mr. Dillon the time seemed now arrived for finding and working a French grievance; and the two clauses in the late treaty, those which concerned language and spirits appeared the proper materials for a quarrel, and, if necessary, a casus belli.

The quarrel prospered to a wish. Ill-will grew up vigorously. Mr. Wyllie and Mr. Dillon darted their