oneness of humanity; that its
roots and springs of action, and ours, draw their sustenance
from one and the same primeval mold; that, however far back
one may travel, he will never come to a point where he can
say this is "common or unclean;" so that he may without
defilement "kill and eat" of what the jungle provides. The
wonder is that they in Hawaii of the centuries past, shut off
by vast spaces of sea and land from our world, yet
accomplished so much.

Test the ancient Hawaiians by our own weights and measures.
The result will not be to their discredit. In practical
science, in domestic arts, in religion, in morals, in the raw
material of literature, even in the finished article--though,
unwritten--the showing would not be such as to give the
superior race cause for self-gratulation.

Another lesson--a corollary to the above--is the debt of
recognition we owe to the virtues and essential qualities of
untutored human nature itself. Imagine a portion of our own
race cut off from the thought-currents of the great world and
stranded on the island-specks of the great ocean, as the
Polynesians have been for a period of centuries that would
count back to the times of William the Conqueror or
Charlemagne, with only such outfit of the world's goods as
might survive a 3,000-mile voyage in frail canoes, reenforced
by such flotsam of the world's metallic stores as the tides
of ocean might chance to bring them--and, with such limited
capital to start with in life, what, should we judge, would
have been the outcome of the experiment in religion, in
morals, in art, in mechanics, in civilization, or in the
production of materials for literature, as compared with what
the white man found in Hawaii at its discovery in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century?

It were well to come to the study of primitive and savage
people, of nature-folk, with a mind purged of the
thanks-to-the-goodness-and-the-grace spirit.
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It will not do for us to brush aside contemptuously the
notions held by the Hawaiians in religion, cosmogony, and