Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 267, 27 August 1891 — Page 4
| This text was transcribed by: | Melissa Eskaran |
| This work is dedicated to: | Awaiaulu |
KA LEO O KA LAHUI.
"E Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono."
KA LEO
John E. Bush
Luna Hooponopono a me Puuku
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 1891
REVIEW
Since our last review of the situation went forward to our foreign readers there have been no exciting occurances to chronicle. At our last writing, the Queen was absent from the capital in a course of tour of this island, - Oahu. She had beem received at Waimanalo with a displau of some taste and considerable expense, to which, it is understood, the chief owner of that plantation “invited” the contract peons of Asiatic birth to contribute, from the pittance allowed them under the name of wages, - and that the “invitation” to contribute was accepted all round: At Kaneohe and Heeia the Royal junket was almost completely ignored by the natives, other than office holders, but among those who gathered to see the pageant (?) was one who, in an address to the party asked some pertinent questions of the Queen as to the object of her junket – and whether it was inspired by love for the native Hawaiians? Her Majesty’s reply, if she made one, to that somewhat searching interrogatory has not been reported to us. The apathy of the people toward the Queen was everywhere manifest, yet her Majesty found the office-holders of the Island so conveniently distributed along the way as to prevent the Royal party from going absolutely hungry. The officials and sugar barons between them contributed nearly all the entertainment to the excursionists.
At Waialua, while returning from a planter’s feast after dark, her Majesty was upset into the bed of a stream by unskillful driving of her carriage, and narrowly escaped injurty that might have been serious, if not fatal to her.
The trip was, in many respects, a poor parody upon a Royal pageant. The sorry spectacle of bedraggled members of the party bringing up the rear on foot, across the hot expanse from Kahuku to Waialua, for want of mounts and carriages to keep up with the procession, is hardly a feature to excite the enthusiasm of spectators of a Royal “progress.”
The return to Honolulu occurred on the afternoon of the 12 th of this month, over the line, of the Oahu Railway Co: There were an utter lack of entusiasm and very few people at the depot upon the Royal arrival – and except the Band, which her Majest upon the Royal arrival – and except the Band, which her Majesty brought hoome with her, no one uttered a note of welcome. The custom of presenting gifts, or hookupus, to Royalty, was more honored in the breach than the observance, during the circuit. A few ducks, chickens, and other elements of a moderate meal, were bundled into a hack and driven toward the Palace as the trophies of the tour.
On the 21 st inst., her Majesty sailed for the one remaining sugar camp of the Kingdom that was still unvisited – Waianae. Having learned some wisdom from former experience, she did not entirely disdain the entertainment of her own people, but stopped over night at the house of a prominent Hawaiian. On the 22 nd , she returned Honoluluward, navigated Pearl Harbor, and spent Sunday at the Ewa “seat” of the wife of one our best paid officials – a Yankee, by the way – and reached Honolulu on Monday the 24 th .
Thus has her Majesty traversed the entire length d breadth of her Kingdom. She has no reason to complain of any lack of attention from either the office holders or the missionary sugar barons. From her own people, however, she failed to receive theo homage which, with Hawaiians, a fair degree of confidence in their sovereign would surely have evoked. No one more sincerely then KA LEO, regrets the disenchanting history of the past few months which has resulted in this apathy of the sons and daughters of the soil toward their Queen. We wish, in all sincerety, we could attribute the cause thereof to her Majesty’s advisers alone, and feel that she is blameless – but such we cannot do.
The interval since our last review of events was sent abroad has been marked by an unmasking of the real position of the ministry concerning political parties. It has been claimed for them by some of their apologists that the ministers represent the National or Popular Party, but upon their official advent they immediately disproved their title to be so considered and their persistent disregard of popular interests and demands has long since dissipated all hope that they could be relied upon to oppose the constant advance of missionary and capitalistic aggrandizement.
But within a week past the National mask has been completely discarded by the administration, and the so called Premier has vigorously declared that he does not care a tinker’s malediction for the National Party – that he does not propose to either submit or cater to the National Party – that he has made a more promising alliance with the enemy than he could hope to obtain from the nationals, and has experienced a change of heart, politically, in consideration of a promise from a representative missionary sugar baron, that the missionaries will adopt the present nondescript administration as their own, and wet-nurse that nameless political foundling through the col@ of the next campaign, safe to its little crib in the lee of the Treasury vaults.
What a commentary upon the supposed, (or rather, suppositious) statesmanship involved in the conduct of this sovereign government. What brazen effrontery for a man who occupies the exalted station of leader of a national government to thus announce a “deal” with his late political opponents, by the terms of which be repudiates his former supporters and their policy holus bolus. What a shamless trafficing in poticial parties and policies. Gods! what a picture for statesmen; what a spectacle for Gladstone, Bismarck, Blaine, to gaze upon and admire. Can the ministerial policy peddlar expect anything but comtempt from either his missionary allies, his late friends, or the readers, in foreign parts, of the history of his perfidy?
Is it not even a political mistake for our so called Premier to rely, for political regeneration, upon the healing effects of Baldwin’s Soothing Syrup? Can the Maui missionary deliver the goods that he has sold, taking his pay in advance? We opine note.
(Written for KA LEO)
HEREDITARY RIGHT
(Concluded)
The doctrine of hereditary right is, in short an elaborate system by which the world shunts its debts and responsibilites, its prejudices, crimes, animosities, and everything else that is bad on to posterity. The curse of humanity is that it ever had any ancestors, and the curse is intensified when it choses to cherish and perpetuate the memory of those ancestors. Considering the deeds and character of ancestors in general the folly of this proceeding passes description. The hereditary principle in the basis of landlordism, for under it men assume to dispose of the right of other men yet unborn to use the soil, in defiance of the obvious law that every generation of humanity has an equal title to the earth and that no one can sell the just claims of posterity any more than he can sell posterity itself into personal @very. It is the basis of monopoly, for by it accumulated fortunes are passed down from father to son, and ninety-nine per cent of mankind are born to hopeless toil in order that one per cent may be born to affluence. It is the corner stone of monarchy and aristocracry, for a fatuous world has taken it for granted, if one man has risen to power by conspicuous merit or fraud or force or lying, that it must endure his descendantts for all time, or else get rid of them by violence; and on the same principle it might as reasonably have resolved that if one man be hanged, then his descendants should likewise be hanged till the family becomes extinct. Also, it is the ground work of patriotism – that costly and questionable virtue, which consists in the stronger plundering ther weaker nation, and in embezzling its territory and in enslaving some feeble race in the sacred name of liberty. The hereditary principle found a noble exponent in the old Gothic warrior who declined to accept the doctrines of Christianity on the ground that his pagan ancestors were already in Gehenna, and he preferred to join them, rather be solitary and neglected among the serephim in Paradise, and three-fourths of the world stands to-day just where that Goth did fifteen hundred years ago.
The theory of hereditary right has innumberable ramifications from the divine right of Kings to the fishy claims of that pirate fossil which has survived the wreck of Hawaiian fuedalism; the Konohiki, and the land shark and the sea shark claim the obeiance of mankind, and alas, it must be confessed that even grovel is hereditary, in fact nearly everything is hereditary, cept brains, which are an accidental circumstance and of infrequent occurrence.
Some day the world will repudiate the old debts, the old landlords and land-titles, and the ancient laws and precedents, the hereditary monarchs and aristocrats and monopolists, and all the inherited lumber of antiquity in one comprehensive act, on the ground that it is weary to death of the crimes and the blunders of its ancestors and can carry the burden no longer. It will realise for the first time that all men are born free and equal – that the son of the stateman or the millionarie must start on precisely the same basis as the son of the assassin who was hanged, or the descendant of the outcast who died in the gutter. It will learn that the offspring of an illicit amour does not inherit the infamy of his parents, and that the saint does not hand down his halo to posterity, and it will abolish the entire law of inheritance as an old exploded superstition. In short, the world will understand at last that its ancestors are dead and forgotten and turned to grass, and that grass is only hay at the best, and hay is a common vegetable which is sold by the ton, and cut up into chaff and given to the cow. Humanity will realise that the nation consists of the living not of the dead, and decline to be hampered by absurd conditions imposed by dead progenitors, for the men of the nineteenth century are no more responsible for the deeds of the men of the eighteenth than they are for those of the Hittites who reigned at Carchemish.
As for the venerable plea that the honor of our ancestors demands a sacrifice, it may be fairly urged that there same ancestors were somewhat short of honor themselves when they were alive, and now that they are dead they have probably gone to a place where the article would be entirely superfluous. And, moreover both nations and governments have been so studiously regardless of posterity, that posterity may be well excused if it returns the sentiment. And when the world ceases to scream about its ancestors it will also cease to cherish the hallowed drivel which those ancestors left behind them, and it will lose its reverence for the ancient abuses which it has valued because they were old and cracked and decrepid; and it will give up trying to pass its responsibilities on to posterity, because posterity will refuse to take them over.
We apologise to our for once again referring to a statement in last Saturday’s Bulletin article on ourselves. After vociferating to “the party” to repudate us before we do “serious damage” to it, other wise “that party” if it don’t “unreservedly and unflinchingly repudiate us, why nothing but disaster and Bulletin @ awaits it in the gate.
Well, we are content ot wait for the disaster, and the bolts of the Bulletin Jupiter which won’t come. We are admitted to be part of a faction, we regret our inability to say as much for our critic, as he cannot claim to be the organ of a party or even a faction.
From the following extract it will be seen that the Bulletin is attempting to lead off in the impending game. It is the desperate yell of a gamester who has unrequested – undertaken to play a lone hand and sees failure ahead. As to the inuendoes about “spoilesmen” and other reflections on the “faction” all we have to say is, that they are too discreetly general to merit notice: -
“Considering ther close result of last election as between the two contesting parties, the National Reform Party has reason to be proud of its platform on that occasion. The principle embodied in that platform have been wonderfully recognized to most of the legislation of the session of 1890. There was nothing in the platform, however, to which the agitation intermittently attempted in the paper KA LEO can be reconciled. Nothing at all in favor of a republic with its hideous suggestion to such a mixed body politic as ours of South American abortions of government, but quite the reverse is to be found in that platform.”
The principles of the National Reform Party have been anything but “wonderfully recognized in most of the session of 1890.” But in so far as any material part of the nationalists platform became law, it proves that that party were entitled to some recognition in the formation of a ministry which their votes made room for, and their policy under constitutional government called for, in order that their principles should not be set aside as they have been.
The “close result of last election as between the two parties” was due to intimidation and fraud on the part of the Planters and their agents, and we intend to further disfust the respectable Bulletin by writing it up in chapter and verse shortly giving names and dates. And the last election the entire monied power and press, under the close control of a few sugar barons were on one side; and the almost entire people with only one solitary newspaper (KA LEO) on the other.
On the other islands where the coolie owner were allowed by an accomodating administration to stand over the ballot boxes, no other result could have been looked for. But the honest untrammelled expression of a free people were seen on this island; and we consider that as a representative of the nobles the Hon. E. C. Macfarlane should, under a form of government claiming to be popular and representative, be entitled to a seat in the cabinet, and on the same ground of standing hight on the poll, Hon. R. W. Wilcox should also be regarded among the chosen of the people. But we find under our present form of non-representative government the expression of the people at the ballot box can practically be set aside by a cabal, which can ride men into power and office like mother goose on a broomstick. As to the statement that there was nothing in the National Platform about a Republic, we reply that the Platform of two years ago was not intended to be a standing monument. The world moves.
That Baron John, who, for being deceived bu his mistress, swore that neither he, nor his ass or ox, nor anything that belonged to him, would ever be seen within the precincts of Amense’s palace, nor be in waiting upon her. That the records show, however, the baron at the shrine saying his devotions to his mistress ready like the repentant son at St. Peter, to kiss the big royal toe. That this sudden change from gall to honey smacks of Judas’ affection for his Master.