are
increased. If now you throw in some special disease, corrupting the blood,
and transmitted with fatal certainty to the progeny, the wonder is that a
people so situated have not died out in a single generation.

In fact they have died out pretty fast, though there is reason to believe
that the mortality rate has largely decreased in the last three years;
and careful observers believe even that in the last year there has been
an actual increase, rather than a decrease in the native and half caste
population. In 1832 the Islands had a population of 130,315 souls; in
1836 there were but 108,579; in 1840, only 84,165, of whom 1962 were
foreigners; in 1850, 69,800, of whom 3216 were foreigners; and in 1860,
62,959, of whom 4194 were foreigners. The native population has decreased
over sixty per cent. in forty years.

In the same period the foreigners have increased very slowly, until there
are now in all 5366 foreigners and persons born here, but of foreign
parentage, on the Islands. You will see that while the Hawaiians have so
rapidly decreased that all over the Islands you notice, in waste fields
and desolate house places, the marks of this loss, foreigners have not
been attracted to fill up their places. And this in spite of the facts
that the climate is mild and healthful, the price of living cheap, the
Government liberal, the taxes low, and life and property as secure as in
any part of the world. One would think that a country which offers all
these advantages must be a paradise for poor men; and I do not wonder that
in the United States there is frequent talk of "annexing the Islands."
But, in fact, they offer no advantages, aside from those I have named, to
white settlers, and they have such serious natural disabilities as will
always--or, at least, for the next two or three millions of years--repel
our American people, and all other white settlers.

In the first place, there is very little of what we call agricultural
land on the Islands. They are only mountains rising from the sea, with
extremely little alluvial bottom, and that usually cut up by torrents, and
water-washed into gulches, until it is difficult in many parts to find
a fair field of even fifty acres. From these narrow bottoms, where they
exist, you look into deep gorges or valleys, out of which issue the
streams which force their way through the lower fields into the sea.
These valleys are never extensive, and are always very much broken and
contr