The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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Nor Can I Divest
Myself Of The Idea That The Laughing, Flower-Clad Hordes Of Riders
Who Make The Town Gay With Their Presence, Are But Like Butterflies
Fluttering Out Their Short Lives In The Sunshine,
". . . A wreck and residue,
Whose only business is to perish."
The statistics on this subject are perfectly appalling. 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.
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