Sir: Having explained who the 3,000 whites are, & what sort of people the 50,000 natives are, I will now shovel in some information as to how this toy realm, with its toy population, is governed. By a constable & six policemen? By a justice of the peace & a jury? By a mayor & a board of aldermen? Oh, no. But by a King—& a Parliament—& a Ministry—& a Privy Council—& a standing army (200 soldiers)—& a navy (steam ferry-boat & a raft)—& a grand bench of supreme justices—& a lord high sheriff on each island. That is the way it is done. It is like propelling a sardine dish with the Great Eastern’s machinery.1explanatory note

Something over 50 years ago the natives, by a sudden impulse which they could not understand themselves, burned all their idols & overthrew the ancient religion of the land. Curiously enough, our first invoice of missionaries were sailing around the Horn at the time, & they arrived just in season to furnish the people a new & much better means of grace.2explanatory note They baptized men, women, & children at once & by wholesale, & proceeded to instruct them in the tenets of the new religion immediately afterward. They built enormous churches, & received into communion as many as 5,000 people in a single day. The fame of it went abroad in the earth, & everywhere the nations rejoiced; the unworldly called it a “great awakening,” & even the unregenerated were touched, & spoke of it with admiration. The missionaries learned the language, translated the Bible & other books into it, established schools, & even very complete colleges, & taught the whole nation to read & write; the princes & nobles acquired collegiate educations, & became familiar with half a dozen dead & living languages. Then, some twenty years later, the missionaries framed a constitution which became the law of the land. It lifted woman up to a level with her lord; it placed the tenant less at the mercy of his landlord; it established a just & equable system of taxation; it introduced the ballot & universal suffrage; it defined & secured to king, chiefs, & people their several rights & privileges; & it instituted a parliament in which all the estates of the realm were to be represented, &, if I remember rightly, it gave this parliament power to pass laws over the King’s veto. 3explanatory note

Things went on swimmingly for several years, & especially under the reign of the late King’s brother, an enlightened & liberal-minded prince; but when he died & Kamehameha V. ascended the throne, matters took a different turn.4explanatory note He was one of your swell “grace of God” Kings, & not the “figure-head” some have said he was; indeed, he was the biggest power in the Islands all his days, & his royal will was sufficient to create a law any time or overturn one.

He was master in the beginning, & at the middle, & to the end. The Parliament was the “figure-head,” & it never was much else in his time. One of his very first acts was to fly into a splendid passion (when his Parliament voted down some measure of his), & tear the beautiful Constitution into shreds, & stamp on them with his royal No. 18s! And his next act was to violently prorogue the Parliament & send the members about their business. He hated Parliaments, as being a rasping & useless incumbrance upon a king, but he allowed them to exist because as an obstruction they were more ornamental than real. He hated universal suffrage & he destroyed it—at least, he took the insides out of it & left the harmless figure. He said he would not have beggars voting industrious people’s money away, & so he compelled the adoption of a cash qualification to vote.5explanatory note He surrounded himself with an obsequious royal Cabinet of American & other foreigners, & he dictated his measures to them &, through them, to his Parliament; & the latter institution opposed them respectfully, not to say apologetically, & passed them.

This is but a sad kind of royal “figure-head.” He was not a fool. He was a wise sovereign; he had seen something of the world; he was educated & accomplished, & he tried hard to do well by his people, & succeeded. There was no trivial royal nonsense about him; he dressed plainly, poked about Honolulu, night or day, on his old horse, unattended; he was popular, greatly respected, & even beloved. Perhaps the only man who never feared him was “Prince Bill,” whom I have mentioned heretofore. Perhaps the only man who ever ventured to speak his whole mind about the King, in Parliament & on the hustings, was the present true heir to the throne—if Prince Bill is still alive, & I have not heard that he is dead. This go-ahead young fellow used to handle His Majesty without gloves, & wholly indifferent to consequences; & being a shade more popular with the native masses than the King himself, perhaps, his opposition amounted to something. The foregoing was the common talk of Honolulu six years ago, & I set the statements down here because I believe them to be true, & not because I know them to be true.

Prince William is about 35 years of age, now, I should think. There is no blood relationship between him & the house of the Kamehamehas.6explanatory note He comes of an older & prouder race; a race of imperious chiefs & princes of the Island of Maui, who held undisputed sway there during several hundred years. He is the eleventh prince in the direct descent, & the natives always paid a peculiar homage to his venerable nobility, which they never vouchsafed to the mushroom Kamehamehas. He is considered the true heir to the Hawaiian throne, for this reason, viz.: A dying or retiring king can name his own successor, by the law of the land—he can name any child of his he pleases, or he can name his brother or any other member of the royal family. The late king has passed away without leaving son, daughter, brother, uncle, nephew, or father (his father never was king—he died a year or two ago),7explanatory note & without appointing a successor. The Parliament has power now to elect a king, & this king can be chosen from any one of the twelve chief families. This has been my understanding of the matter, & I am very sure I am right. In rank, Prince William overtops any chief in the Islands about as an English royal duke overtops a mere earl. He is the only Hawaiian, outside of the royal family, who is entitled to bear & transmit the title of Prince; & he is so popular that if the scepter were put to a popular vote he would “walk over the track.”

He used to be a very handsome fellow, with a truly princely deportment, drunk or sober; but I merely speak figuratively—he never was drunk; he did not hold enough. All his features were fine, & he had a Roman nose that was a model of beauty & grandeur. He was brim full of spirit, pluck & enterprise; his head was full of brains, & his speech was facile & all alive with point & vigor; there was nothing underhanded or two-faced about him, but he always went straight at everything he undertook, without caring who saw his hand or understood his game. He was a potent friend of America & Americans. Such is the true heir to the vacant throne—if he is not dead, as I said before.

I have suggested that William drinks. That is not an objection to a Sandwich Islander. Whisky cannot hurt them; it can seldom even tangle the legs or befog the brains of a practiced native. It is only water with a flavor to it, to Prince Bill; it is what cider is to us. Poi is the all-powerful agent that protects the lover of whisky. Whoever eats it habitually may imbibe habitually without serious harm. The late king & his late sister Victoria8explanatory note both drank unlimited whisky, & so would the rest of the natives if they could get it. The native beverage, awa, is so terrific that mere whisky is foolishness to it. It turns a man’s skin to white fish-scales that are so tough a dog might bite him, & he would not know it till he read about it in the papers. It is made of a root of some kind. The “quality” drink this to some extent, but the Excise law has placed it almost beyond the reach of the plebeians. After awa, what is whisky?

Many years ago the late King & his brother visited California,9explanatory note & some Sacramento folks thought it would be fun to get them drunk. So they gathered together the most responsible soakers in the town & began to fill up royalty & themselves with strong brandy punches. At the end of two or three hours the citizens were all lying torpid under the table & the two princes were sitting disconsolate & saying what a lonely, dry country it was! I tell it to you as it was told to me in Sacramento.

The Hawaiian Parliament consists of half a dozen chiefs, a few whites, & perhaps thirty or forty common Kanakas. The King’s ministers (half a dozen whites) sit with them & ride over all opposition to the King’s wishes. There are always two people speaking at once—the member & the public translator. The little legislature is as proud of itself as any parliament could be, & puts on no end of airs. The wisdom of a Kanaka legislature is as profound as that of our ordinary run of State legislatures, but no more so. Perhaps God makes all legislatures alike in that respect. I remember one Kanaka bill that struck me: it proposed to connect the islands of Oahu & Hawaii with a suspension bridge, because the sea voyage between these points was attended with so much sea-sickness that the natives were greatly discommoded by it. This suspension bridge would have been 150 miles long!

I can imagine what is going on in Honolulu now, during this month of mourning, for I was there when the late King’s sister, Victoria, died. David Kalakaua (a chief), Commander-in-Chief of the Household Troops (how is that, for a title?) is no doubt standing guard now over the closed entrances to the “palace” grounds, keeping out all whites but officers of State;10explanatory note & within, the Christianized heathen are howling & dancing & wailing & carrying on in the same old savage fashion that obtained before Cook discovered the country. I lived three blocks from the wooden two-story palace when Victoria was being lamented, & for thirty nights in succession the mourning pow-wow defied sleep. All that time the christianized but morally unclean Princess lay in state in the palace.11explanatory note I got into the grounds one night & saw some hundreds of half-naked savages of both sexes beating their dismal tom-toms, & wailing & caterwauling in the weird glare of innumerable torches; & while a great band of women swayed & jiggered their pliant bodies through the intricate movements of a lascivious dance called the hula-hula, they chanted an accompaniment in native words. I asked the son of a missionary what the words meant. He said they celebrated certain admired gifts & physical excellencies of the dead princess. I inquired further, but he said the words were too foul for translation; that the bodily excellencies were unmentionable; that the capabilities so lauded & so glorified had better be left to the imagination. He said the King was doubtless sitting where he could hear these ghastly praises & enjoy them. That is, the late King—the educated, cultivated Kamehameha V. And mind you, one of his titles was “the Head of the Church;” for, although he was brought up in the religion of the missionaries, & educated in their schools & colleges, he early learned to despise their plebeian form of worship, & had imported the English system & an English bishop, & bossed the works himself. You can imagine the saturnalia that is making the night hideous in the palace grounds now, where His Majesty is lying in state.

The late King was frequently on hand in the royal pew in the Royal Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, on Sundays; but whenever he got into trouble he did not fly to the cross for help—he flew to the heathen gods of his ancestors. Now this was a man who would write you a beautiful letter, in a faultless hand, & word it in faultless English; & perhaps throw in a few graceful classic allusions; & perhaps a few happy references to science, international law, or the world’s political history; or he would array himself in elegant evening dress & entertain you at his board in princely style, & converse like a born Christian gentleman; & day after day he would work like a beaver in affairs of State, & on occasion exchange autograph letters with the kings & emperors of the old world. And the very next week, business being over, he would retire to a cluster of dismal little straw-thatched native huts by the sea-shore, & there for a fortnight he would turn himself into a heathen whom you could not tell from his savage grandfather. He would reduce his dress to a breech-clout, fill himself daily full of whisky, & sit with certain of his concubines while others danced the peculiar hula-hula. And if oppressed by great responsibilities he would summon one of his familiars, an ancient witch, & ask her to tell him the opinion & the commands of the heathen gods, & these commands he would obey. He was so superstitious that he would not step over a line drawn across a road, but would walk around it. These matters were common talk in the Islands. I never saw this King but once, & then he was not on his periodical debauch. He was in evening dress attending the funeral of his sister, & had a yard of crape depending from his stove-pipe hat.

If you will be so good as to remember that the population of the islands is but a little over 50,000 souls, & that over that little handful of people roosts a monarchy with its coat-tails fringed with as many mighty-titled dignitaries as would suffice to run the Russian Empire, you will wonder how, the offices all being filled, there can be anybody left to govern. And the truth is, that it is one of the oddest things in the world to stumble on a man there who has no title. I felt so lonesome, as being about the only unofficial person in Honolulu, that I had to leave the country to find company.

After all this exhibition of imperial grandeur, it is humiliating to have to say that the entire exports of the kingdom are not as much as $1,500,000, the imports in the neighborhood of that figure, & the revenues, say $500,000. And yet they pay the King $36,000 a year, & the other officials from $3,000 to $8,000—& heaven knows there are enough of them.

The National Debt was $150,000 when I was there—& there was nothing in the country they were so proud of. They would n’t have taken any money for it. With what an air His Excellency the Minister of Finance12explanatory note lugged in his Annual Budget & read off the impressive items & flourished the stately total!

The “Royal Ministers” are natural curiosities. They are white men of various nationalities, who have wandered thither in times gone by. I will give you a specimen—but not the most favorable. Harris, for instance. Harris is an American—a long-legged, vain, light-weight village lawyer from New-Hampshire. If he had brains in proportion to his legs, he would make Solomon seem a failure; if his modesty equaled his ignorance, he would make a violet seem stuck-up; if his learning equaled his vanity, he would make von Humboldt seem as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone;13explanatory note if his stature were proportioned to his conscience, he would be a gem for the microscope; if his ideas were as large as his words, it would take a man three months to walk around one of them; if an audience were to contract to listen as long as he would talk, that audience would die of old age; & if he were to talk until he said something, he would still be on his hind legs when the last trump sounded. And he would have cheek enough to wait till the disturbance was over, & go on again.

Such is (or was) His Excellency Mr. Harris, his late Majesty’s Minister of This, That, & The Other—for he was a little of everything; & particularly & always he was the King’s most obedient humble servant & loving worshiper, & his chief champion & mouthpiece in the parliamentary branch of ministers. And when a question came up (it did n’t make any difference what it was), how he would rise up & saw the air with his bony flails, & storm & cavort & hurl sounding emptiness which he thought was eloquence, & discharge bile which he fancied was satire, & issue dreary rubbish which he took for humor, & accompany it with contortions of his undertaker countenance which he believed to be comic expression!

He began in the islands as a little, obscure lawyer, & rose (?) to be such a many-sided official grandee that sarcastic folk dubbed him, “the wheels of the Government.” He became a great man in a pigmy land—he was of the caliber that other countries construct constables & coroners of. I do not wish to seem prejudiced against Harris, & I hope that nothing I have said will convey such an impression. I must be an honest historian, & to do this in the present case I have to reveal the fact that this stately figure, which looks so like a Washington monument in the distance, is nothing but a thirty-dollar windmill when you get close to him.

Harris loves to proclaim that he is no longer an American, & is proud of it; that he is a Hawaiian through & through, & is proud of that, too; & that he is a willing subject & servant of his lord & master, the King, & is proud & grateful that it is so.

Now, let us annex the islands. Think how we could build up that whaling trade! {Though under our courts & judges it might soon be as impossible for whaleships to rendezvous there without being fleeced & “pulled” by sailors & pettifoggers as it now is in San Francisco—a place the skippers shun as they would rocks & shoals.} Let us annex. We could make sugar enough there to supply all America, perhaps, & the prices would be very easy with the duties removed. And then we would have such a fine half-way house for our Pacific-plying ships; & such a convenient supply depot & such a commanding sentry-box for an armed squadron; & we could raise cotton & coffee there & make it pay pretty well, with the duties off & capital easier to get at. And then we would own the mightiest volcano on earth—Kilauea! Barnum could run it—he understands fires now.14explanatory note Let us annex, by all means. We could pacify Prince Bill & other nobles easily enough—put them on a reservation. Nothing pleases a savage like a reservation—a reservation where he has his annual hoes, & Bibles & blankets to trade for powder & whisky—a sweet Arcadian retreat fenced in with soldiers. By annexing, we would get all those 50,000 natives cheap as dirt, with their morals & other diseases thrown in. No expense for education—they are already educated; no need to convert them—they are already converted; no expense to clothe them—for obvious reasons.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise & beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers & Government defaulters, & show them how amusing it is to arrest them & try them & then turn them loose—some for cash & some for “political influence.” We can make them ashamed of their simple & primitive justice. We can do away with their occasional hangings for murder, & let them have Judge Pratt to teach them how to save imperiled Avery-assassins to society.15explanatory note We can give them some Barnards to keep their money corporations out of difficulties.16explanatory note We can give them juries composed entirely of the most simple & charming leatherheads. We can give them railway corporations who will buy their Legislatures like old clothes, & run over their best citizens & complain of the corpses for smearing their unpleasant juices on the track. In place of harmless & vaporing Harris, we can give them Tweed. We can let them have Connolly; we can loan them Sweeny; we can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable.17explanatory note We can confer Woodhull & Claflin on them. And George Francis Train.18explanatory note We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, & array it in the moral splendor of our high & holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. “Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”19explanatory note

Hartford, Jan. 6, 1873.                             Mark Twain.