ABSTRACT

We must recall briefly the efficient causes which led to this event. Liholiho, the son of Kamehameha, succeeded to the kingdom on his father's deatb, being at the time twenty-two years of age. As has been stated, be had

already, in 1809, been invested with royal honours" in order to secure a quiet and uninterrupted succession to the crown. In character he was very unlike his father. His disposition was frank and humane, indolent and pleasure-loving. The very force of one man's character not unfrequently dwarfs that of others who long have dwelt under its shelter. In his father's lifetime there was no call, no room for original energy or action; and there would be no competition of wills where the result of a struggle was certain beforehand. The prince possessed dignified and agreeable manners, an enquiring mind and a retent.ivememory; but he lived a dissipated existence, and was intemperate in the use of stimulants. As long as his father lived, little or no change was perceptible in the idolatrous system of the nation. Unquestionably there had been a growing scepticism in the people's mind about the gods they bowed to, and a growing knowledge of and impatience under the yoke of oppressive services, tabus, &c., jointly fastened on their necks by the tyranny of kingship, chiefdom, and sacerdotalism, uniting in the common object of their own aggrandizement. A leaven was working in the mass. The sparks of light left by Vancouver were not entirely trodden out. These were directly for good. Intercourse with foreigners was a more mixed influence, and a more indirect path towards better things. Sensual, scornful, and devoted to avarice as was the life of many of the white visitors, it was denied even to these, whatever might be in their heart, to be quite as the heathen were. There was the vital phenomenon of double consciousness; and in the fever of excess they sometimes uttered the words of an early piety, and reproduced long-forgotten fruits of childhood's teaching. The foreigners set bad examples of Chri~tianity: bllt

the universal' Nay,' according to Mr. Carlyle, has to precede the universal' Yea; , and their open disbelief and ridicule of the idolatrous system existing', made the Hawaiians sceptical at least; though, as was natural, fear in many cases mingled with their disbelief. They were now eating ofthe tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were open: they saw that all things around them were false, and that they themselves were naked ;-but the other pJant, of heavenly growth, the tree of life, had not been given to them as yet.