The Next Day The Corpse Lay In State, In All The Splendour That The Islands Could Bestow, Dressed In The Clothes The King Wore When He Took The Oath Of Office, And Resting On The Royal Robe Of Yellow Feathers, A Fathom Square.

{468} Between eight and ten thousand persons passed through the palace during the morning, and foreigners as well as natives wept tears of genuine grief; while in the palace grounds the wailing knew no intermission, and many of the natives spent hours in reciting kanakaus in honour of the deceased.

At midnight the king's remains were placed in a coffin, his aged father, His Highness Kanaina, who was broken-hearted for his loss, standing by. When the body was raised from the feather robe, he ordered that it should be wrapped in it, and thus be deposited in its resting place. "He is the last of our race," he said; "it belongs to him." The natives in attendance turned pale at this command, for the robe was the property of Kekauluohi, the dead king's mother, and had descended to her from her kingly ancestors.

Averse through his life to useless parade and display, Lunalilo left directions for a simple funeral, and that none of the old heathenish observances should ensue upon his death. So, amidst unbounded grief, he was carried to the grave with hymns and anthems, and the hopes of Hawaii were buried with him.

He died without naming a successor, and thus for the second time within fourteen months, a king came to be elected by ballot.

The proceedings at the election of Lunalilo were marked by an order, regularity, and peaceableness which reflected extreme credit on the civilization of the Hawaiians, but in the subsequent period the temper of the people had considerably changed, and they had been affected by influences to which some allusions were made in Letter XIX.

In politics, Lunalilo's views were essentially democratic, and he showed an almost undue deference to the will of the people, giving them a year's practical experience of democracy which they will never forget.

An antagonism to the foreign residents, or rather to their political influence, had grown rapidly. Some of the Americans had been unwise in their language, and the discussion on the proposed cession of Pearl River increased the popular discontent, and the jealousy of foreign interference in island affairs. "America gave us the light," said a native pastor, in a sermon which was reported over the islands, "but now that we have the light, we should be left to use it for ourselves." This sentence represented the bulk of the national feeling, which, if partially unenlightened, is intensely, passionately, almost fanatically patriotic.

The biennial election of delegates to the Legislative Assembly occurred shortly before Lunalilo's death, and the rallying-cry, "Hawaii for the Hawaiians," was used with such effect that the most respectable foreign candidates, even in the capital, had not a chance of success, and for the first time in Hawaiian constitutional history, a house was elected, consisting, with one exception, of natives.

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