Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 277, 10 September 1891 — Page 4

KA LEO.

John E. Bush.

Luna Hooponopono a me Puuku.

THURSDAY, SEPT 10, 1891.

 

A SAMPLE.

            We have long persisted in the claim that there is no sympathy for labor, on the part of the sugar barons.  We reiterate our oft-expressed belief that the wealthy moguls regard as a workingman merely as a piece of machinery which for a cash consideration, they are at liberty to use while they have use for it, and when it is no longer convenient to pay the price, they are equally at liberty to discard the piece of human mechanism,—to throw away the utensil of flesh and blood,—with the nonchalance of a dude in discarding an out-of-date garment.

            Illustrations of these truths have been painfully numerous in the past.  Another has been brought to our notice during recent days.  A well and popularly known mechanic has lately been engaged on an Oahu plantation overseeing the laying and connecting of a pipe line.  His duties obliged him to suffer heat and thirst almost unendurable.  His compensation was the princely figure of three dollars per day.  His assistants were a gang of Japanese peons, their wage a few cents per day.  They readily picked up the knowledge requisite to enable them to supply the place of the high-priced white mechanic.  They were soon prepared with the aptness characteristic of our Asiatic slaves, to supplant the white man in his vocation.  The barons used the white man a three dollars per day, until his heathen helpers had been taught the art of pipe-laying, after which the coolies were left to utilize their newly acquired knowledge, and the white man was discarded.  The latter has since been seeking employment at a wage that will provide him with a diet more palatable and nutritive than rice and rats; but the competition of Asiatic coolies, under the beneficient and disinterested management of the sugar ring patriots has well-nigh extinguished the prospect of employment for white men, outside the two chief manufacturing concerns here in Honolulu.

 

SOCIALISM.

            A number of our friends have become a trifle alarmed at the apparently radical tendencies of some of the Leo’s articles and expression that we are bordering on communism or socialism.  To the majority of people who have given the subject no thought or study, these two issues convey the idea of anarchy, lawlessness, dynamite, pillage and a general destruction of society.  But these are only an accidental feature at the progress of socialistic doctrines, caused by fanatical agitators more or less common to all great innovations, and no more represent the purpose and theory of socialism, than bloody revolutions embody the spirit of political liberties.

            Socialism is a modern cult, a political science, a philosophy, the realization of which is being gradually and slowly but surely reached as the world progresses.  It must not be in our generation or in the next, but there is a certain revolution or evolution going on in the economic affairs of the world which will eventually culminate in the triumph for the teachings and writings of the modern socialist or social democrat.

            Socialism had its genesis in the industrial progress and revolution which began in England in the latter part of the 18th, century, but it is essentially a feature of the 19th century, the word having been coined in England in 1835 by Robert Owen and his school, at which time the theories of social improvement and reconstruction became agitated and established as a political thought and factor and has come into real contact with the public history of the world.  Owen was followed in France by Saint Simon, Fourier and Louis Blanc, and later in Germany by the greatest and most influential of them all, Karl Marx.  All of these leaders and writers have founded powerful schools of thought and action that are now agitating the world.

            The complaint of socialism is that for centuries the producing classes have been excluded from the possession of land and capital, and have been held in subjection as workers depending only on the precarious wage labor; the world has been a vast proletariat stuggle for subsistence and living in ignorance and degredation while supporting in idleness and luxury a small body of wealthy capitalists.  To alleviate this condition and to secure a more equitable distribution of liberty, equality and happiness, the socialist propose that land and capital, — the requisites for labor and the source of wealth, — should become the property of the State, and that all industry and enterprise should be governed and controlled by the State for the benefit of all.  Laveleye says: “In the first place, every socialistic doctrine aims at introducing greater equality in social conditions, and in the second place at realizing those reforms by the law or the state.”  Kirkup says: “Socialism is usually regarded as a phase of the struggle for the emancipation of labor, for the complete participation of the working classes in the material, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance of the human race.”  In brief the essence of socialism is state control of land and associated production through a collective capital with the view to an equitable distribution of the results.

            The progress towards the realization of this theory of socialism is apparent in every civilized country, but it may be noted more particularly in England where step by step the state has absorbed wholly or partially functions that were formerly left to private enterprise.  Beside the army, navy and police, the state controls and directs the Post Office, telegraphs parcels delivery, surveys shipbuilding, stock-broking, banking, farming, money lending, the making, sweeping, lighting, and reparing of streets; roads and bridges, life insurance, annuities, coinage, midwifery, nursery, education, board and lodging, public worship, amusements and interment; museum-parks, art galleries, libraries, concert balls, markets, fire engines, lighthousees, pilots, ferries, life boats, cemeteries, public baths, wash-houses, pounds, harbors, wharves, hospitals, dispenasries gas works, water-works, tramways, telegraph cables, &c. &c. &c., and in the colonies the local government provies, railways, canals, pawn-broking, theatres, forestry, sinchona and tea farms, irrigation, casinos, public baths, immigration, and deals in ballast, guano, quinine, salt, &c., &c.  In other countries the state has also taken up gun powder, tobacco, matches, etc.  In each one of these services or enterprises the public is better serves and benefitted than if they were conducted by private enterprises.  State interference between capital and labor in enacting laws to protect the laborer and rectify the brutal abuses that formerly existed is another advance of the socialist idea.  The tendency of the times to combination of capital in cooperative societies, joint stock companies, corporations and trusts, which in time have to submit to legislative enactments, is another rapid advance in the evolution of socialism.  In fact the whole world is under social tendencies, or return to first principles in the formation of human society.

            We have the highest respect for the doctrines of the modern social democrat,—not the common demagogue—and we belive that, in the conti@ued struggle of labor against capital, of the masses against the classes, of the starving proletariat against the idleness and viciousness of the wealthy aristocracy or upstart plutocracy, will in process of time evolve a social revolution that will establish forms of government upon the basis of socialism.

            But the Leo is not advocating the socialistic doctrine in Hawaii in its entirety.  In fact, we are in direct collision with its principal feature, for we favor the individual peasant proprietorship of the soil, believing that in our present state of progress, our future wealth and prosperity can only be built up on this basis and that socialism will not come in conflict with our economic conditions for a few decades at least.  Secondly we do not consider that Hawaii is yet ripe for that full interference of the state in affiars now conducted by private capital.

            The Leo’s articles which have alarmed our friends are not based on socialism, still less on communism, nihilism or any similar isms, but on the modern principles of political democracy, that seek to place the powers of government in the hands of the people, to be administered for the benefit of all on the principles of liberty and equality, but at the dictation of a majority of constitutional voters.

            That missionary sugar barons, are again in too prominennt and obnoxious evidence: decorated for distinguished services rendered the state by feasting her Majesty on her royal tour.

 

A ROMANCE.

The Paradise of the Pacific

OR

The Devil’s Kuleana.

(Continued by Uncle Beke.)

            At last there was an interval of quiet, and Nyama began to doze.

            He was aroused again by the tread of heavy boots which at last descended the stairs.  They were going, he thought with relief.

            With much difficulty they mounted their horses and rode away.

            At last Nyama slept but not for long.  He was awakened by the fall of some o@ject against the wall of the house followed by the rattling of tin.  He gave up all hope of sleeping and got up and dressed and went outside.  The grey down was casting its cold light on the near landscape while the night still reigned over the ocean of waters in the distance.  A bright little fire was burning among the rocks and by it squatted a white robed figure adjusting a tin coffee-pot over the flame.  It was the girl Mary.  She wore a very short and sleeveless night gown.  She turned her red and watery eyes on Nyama, “you want some coffee?” she asked smiling a rather drunken and sleepy smile.  Though she was still under the influence of liquor, she did not show in that state wicked or abandoned bestiality that dissipation produces in Europeans.

            “Yes;” said Nyama, “you company did not let us sleep much last night.”

            “No; they don’t let me sleep at all, too much humbug,” she assented.

            “Don’t you feel ashamed to drink and carry on that way all night?” he asked.

            “What for ashamed?  Every body do that way; you do allsame, I suppose.”

            “How can your father and mother let you girls act so.  Your father is a good man, it must be sad for him to see his children act this way.  Don’t you think it is against God’s law to be so bad.”

            The girl rose up and stared at the speaker.  “What for you think me bad?” she exclaimed indignantly, and gathered up her gown to an alarming extent and tucked it under her arm, “Whatsamata?  My father good man; every Sunday go to church; he no care; I buy good coat, good hat, shoes, bible, sing book, everything for him; I buy eat, everything eat, everything go inside house.  Suppose I no do so, nobody eat; my father no go preach, no pray, no nothing.  I think God like what I do.  Japanee no use!!”

            Nyama was not prepared to argue the question and wished rathe to pacify her, so he said:

            “Yes; I know you are good; you were very kind to us to-day.”

            “Of course; I no ask you for money for eat, for sleep, I give everything to you.  I make money.”  She said showing two small gold coins and giving her hips a flexuous rotary motion as if to indicate her way of making money.

            Nyama thought best to change the subject.  “Are you not cold?” he asked.

            She dropped her gown and sat down on a stone.  “Pretty soon I go to bed,” she said, then after a pause: “Please you go upstairs and bring me my shall.  He stop on nail inside my room, second room inside.”

            Nyama politely acceeded to her request and went up the stairs and opened the door.  He saw a large room illuminated by a large lamp burning on the table.  Objects of all kinds strewed the floor, bric-a-brac, overturned furniture, bottles, glasses, articles of wearing apparel, spilled tobacco, and cigar stumps.  It was plainly the abandoned field of mid night dissipations.  Looking to the left through an open door Nyama saw a half naked figure lying crosswire on a bed.  The bed clothes were in a heap on the floor.  It was the younger sister in a deep sleep, she was no more than fifteen years old, and she looked very beautiful as she lay completely relaxed in deep unconsciousness.  Her chemise had been torn to shreds and but slightly concealed the brown skin of her graceful limbs and budding breasts.

 

ON DIT.

            That in view of the determined hostility of the Cabinet against appointing Hawaiians to the civil service, Ka Leo advises all our young men to emigrate for a couple of years, then they may return as malihini’s and will be received with open arms by the government and by society.

            That the Jew smuggler got so scared when he read Ka Leo’s article on “those smuggled gems” on Tuesday morning that he took his immediate departure by the Zealandia, uttering maledictions on Hawaiian newspapers.

            That Ka Leo tenders its compliments to the Advitiser for the animation it has displayed in reprinting the Hilo Record’s article on the political situation, and its dignified stricture upon the new Privy Council appointments.

            That the Bulletin cannot fairly say of Ka Leo that “cannot fathom the amenities of respectable journalism.”  To talk about a thing one must have some knowledge of it, and the editor of the Bulletin never was in his life connected with any “respectable journal.”

            That the Queen never loses an opportunity of manifesting her attention, partiality and love for the most prominent members of the missionary Reform Party, but has nevery vet once shwon the smallest courtesy to any of the National Party.

            That medals and decorations is used here as an economical and cheap method of paying for luaus.

           That the little “red lion” proved himself in the Legislature to be a braying ass in disguise, and the Leo knew it, as he sat between the said ass and the harmless and handy little beaver, at table at a saloon named after the latter.  Ta, ta.

            That it is pretty hard to “chaw” even mutton, with the har still on one’s teeth.

            That the P.C. Advertiser is growing quite ‘National’ in its tendencies and expressions, and will eventually shake hands with the Leo for the overthrow of the present Cabinet and the furtherance of republican institutions.

            That one Barefooted Bill has been caught.