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.

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