o to have many husbands. The nearest ties
of consanguinity were but little regarded, and among the chiefs,
especially, the connection of brother with sister, and parent with
child, were very common. For husbands to interchange wives, and
for wives to interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship,
and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms
of sociability. For a man or woman to refuse a solicitation was
considered an act of meanness; and this sentiment was thoroughly
wrought into their minds, that, they seemed not to rid themselves of
the feeling of meanness in a refusal, to feel, notwithstanding their
better knowledge, that to comply was generous, liberal, and social,
and to refuse reproachful and niggardly. It would be impossible to
enumerate or specify the crimes which emanated from this state of
affairs. Their political condition was the very genius of despotism,
systematically and deliberately conducted. Kings and chiefs were
extremely jealous of their succession, and the more noble their blood,
the more they were venerated by the common people."

Mr. Sheldon Dibble is a historian whose work was published in 1843. He
complains most bitterly that the natives bothered the missionaries
by trying to give them the benefit of native thought. They wanted
to do some of the talking, and said very childish things, and were
so intent on their own thoughts that they would not listen to the
preachers. But it ought not to have been held to be an offense for
a procession of heathen to march to a missionary's house and tell
him their thoughts. That was an honest manifestation of profound
interest--the slow ripening of a harvest field. Mr. Dibble's book
is printed by the Mission Seminary, and Mr. Dibble says, page 21:
"We know that all the inhabitants of the earth descended from Noah,"
therefore, the Hawaiians "must once have known the great Jehova
and the principles of true religion." But the historian says on the
next page that the Hawaiians were heathen from time immemorial, for,
"Go back to the very first reputed progenitor of the Hawaiian race,
and you find that the ingredients of their character are lust, anger,
strife, malice, sensuality, revenge and the worship of idols." This
is the elevation upon which Mr. Dibble places himself to fire upon
the memory of the English navigator Captain James Cook. The first
paragraph of the assault on Cook is this:

"How unbounded the influence of foreign vis