If We Reduce Captain Cook's Estimate Of The Native Population By One- Fourth, It Was 300,000 In 1779.

In 1872 it was only 49,000.

The first official census was in 1832, when the native population was 130,000. This makes the decrease 80,000 in forty years, or at the rate of 2000 a year, and fixes the period for the final extinction of the race in 1897, if that rate were to continue. It is a pity, for many reasons, that it is dying out. It has shown a singular aptitude for politics and civilization, and it would have been interesting to watch the development of a strictly Polynesian monarchy starting under passably fair conditions. Whites have conveyed to these shores slow but infallible destruction on the one hand, and on the other the knowledge of the life that is to come; and the rival influences of blessing and cursing have now been fifty years at work, producing results with which most reading people are familiar.

I have not heard the subject spoken of, but I should think that the decrease in the population must cause the burden of taxation to press heavily on that which remains. Kings, cabinet ministers, an army, a police, a national debt, a supreme court, and common schools, are costly luxuries or necessaries. The civil list is ludicrously out of proportion to the resources of the islands, and the heads of the four departments - Foreign Relations, Interior, Finance, and Law(Attorney-General) - receive $5,000 a year each! Expenses and salaries have been increasing for the last thirty years. For schools alone every man between twenty-one and sixty pays a tax of two dollars annually, and there is an additional general tax for the same purpose. I suppose that there is not a better educated country in the world. Education is compulsory; and besides the primary schools, there are a number of academies, all under Government supervision, and there are 324 teachers, or one for every twenty-seven children. There is a Board of Education, and Kamakau, its president, reported to the last biennial session of the legislature that out of 8931 children between the ages of six and fifteen, 8287 were actually attending school! Among other direct taxes, every quadruped that can be called a horse, above two years old, pays a dollar a year, and every dog a dollar and a half. Does not all this sound painfully civilized? If the influence of the tropics has betrayed me into rhapsody and ecstacy in earlier letters, these dry details will turn the scale in favour of prosaic sobriety!

I have said little about Honolulu, except of its tropical beauty. It does not look as if it had "seen better days." Its wharves are well cared for, and its streets and roads are very clean. The retail stores are generally to be found in two long streets which run inland, and in a splay street which crosses both. The upper storekeepers, with a few exceptions, are Americans, but one street is nearly given up to Chinamen's stores, and one of the wealthiest and most honourable merchants in the town is a Chinaman.

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