es themselves to resist and
their friends to aid and to applaud them. Their liability is for
disease; they are lepers; and what they combine to combat is not
punishment but segregation. While China, and England, and France, in
their tropical possessions, either attempt nothing or effect little,
Hawaii has honourably faced the problem of this ancient and apparently
reviving malady. Her small extent is an advantage; but the ruggedness of
the physical characters, the desert woods and mountains, and the habit
of the native mind, oppose success. To the native mind, our medical
opinions seem unfounded. We smile to hear of ghosts and gods; they, when
they are told to keep warm in fevers or to avoid contagion. Leprosy in
particular they cannot be persuaded to avoid. But no mere opinion would
exalt them to resist the law and lie in forests did not a question of
the family bond embitter and exasperate the opposition. Their family
affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent,
circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without
nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval
of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single
demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death
intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified
fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation
often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the
dwellers are well used in Molokai; they receive letters from friends
already there who praise the place; and could the family be taken in a
body, they would go with glee, overjoyed to draw rations from
Government. But all cannot become pensioners at once; a proportion of
rate-payers must be kept; and the leper must go alone or with a single
relative; and the native instinctively resists the separation as a
weasel bites. A similar reluctance can be shown in Molokai itself. By a
recent law, clean children born within the precinct are taken from their
leper parents, sent to an intermediate hospital, and given a chance of
life and health and liberty. I have stood by while Mr. Meyer and Mr.
Hutchinson, the luna and the sub-luna of the lazaretto, opened the
petitions of the settlement. As they sat together on the steps of the
guest-house at Kalawao, letter after letter was passed between them with
a sneer, and flung upon the ground; till I was at last struck with this
cavalier p