Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 439, 23 ʻApelila 1892 — Page 4

KA LEO O KA LAHUI.

"E Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono."

 

KA LEO.

 

John E. Bush

I  ana Hooponopono a me Puuku.

 

MONDAY, APRIL, 25, 1892.

 

Ourselves.

 

            It will be a surprise to some of our friends to read our announcement that with this issue, our English will cease.   For some time past our native readers have felt the loss of the page which has been abstracted from them and we know that English is as dead a language as Greek, to four-fifths of our Hawaiian subscribers, the dictum of the Surpreme Court in a recent case to the contrary notwithstanding.

            While thanking our English reading friends for their support, and apreciation so often kindly expressed, we are forced by circumstances to devote outselves to the original and main supporters of KA LEO.

            We have endeavored with such slender means as we could command to voice the Democracy, and we shall still continue to do it in Hawaiian.

            We would sooner go out of the newspaper business than "sell out" ourselves or our principles to a selfseeking syndicate, and such has been the fate of every demoratic newspaper started in Honolulu.

            We have never trimmed our sails to catch the fresh breezes of government advertising although we command a wider circle of readers than any other paper in Honolulu.

            We retire from the English-paper aide of the conflict conscious of the fact that we have stood manfully to our post.  There is perhaps no place of equal size in Christendom where the press Cerberus is so well muzzled as in Honolulu, and our conciousness of this foct half tempts us to blend our Adien with Au revoir.

 

The Question of Equality.

 

            Whenever the well-fed holder of mush of this world's wealth wishes to absolutely crush and logically pulverise his socialistic or demoratic opponent, like the Christians who put their failing on the Devil's book, he throws all the responsiouity of the short-comings of the existing condition of things upon the shoulders of a much abused myth which he calls Nature.

            This lady, whom he pictures as a sort of cruel fairy godmother, is supposed to live somewhere within the bowels of the earth, musing most of the time on the necessity of going forth to kill something, and filling in her leisure moments making cyclone end tidal-waves, crockediles and monopolists and various other pests, to serve her as missonaries of death and destruction.

            "Survival of fittest" is a stock phrase with the average objector who values "fitness" at hank-rates and measures manhood by average; but he le@ sight @ of the fact that finality is the only test applicable to the conditions, and that the survivor may, in all probability be nothing more than the infinitesmal life-germ that eats away the iron-rails of locomotive tracks or througs the tiny pores of the granite of which mea fashion basement stones for financial institutions.

 

            Men are not born equal; but the institution of the States is in itself and avowed effort to lesson the horrors of inequity as much as possible, and any state is advanced and progressive in proportion as the strength of the strong and the cunning of the oanny are levelled down to the weakness of the weak and the simplicity of the simple. Otherwise that best possible of all governments would be a competitive tyranny in which the spoils would be to the most ruthless and the most brutal and unscrupulous among men.  What a hideous thing would be a tyranny of genius with successive JULIUS CESARS or NAPOLEAN BONAPARTES churshing out the life and energy of States, and dissipating the manhood of nations in wars subserving only their own ambitious end@  Fortunately the genius is ordinarily succeeded by the fool, and the exhausted community has a chance of recovering somewhat of its misused vigor, and of again breasting up to the standard set by its too energetic masters of a preceding generation.  To say what the mere possession of extraordinary ability to acquire, constitutes a right (in the moral sense) to override the rights of thos less able to do so, is simply to give the denial to all the ideals of humanity, which for at least eighteen contries has found the highest expresssion of its perfected manhood in the personality of one to whom the moral right was paramount.  Craft, and not merit, seizes most of the material rewards of life, and this modern deification of mere monetary success is the excuse which the system of F@@e Competition lays hold of to justify its existence.  An enormous per centage of such wealth has been inherited by men totally incapable by themselves, of earning even an average livelihood, and it has been augmented and kept continuously increasing by means of a system of social mechanism that no one  man in the world could possibly contrive.

 

            Putting aside however all considerations as the means by which wealth has been acquired, together with the questions involved, by an assessment of priority or equality of oppurtunities, the issue is a very simple one, and it is this: should men hold political power in proportion to their income or not?  If it is granted that a fifty dollars a month income or $3000 in earth is the border line which entitles a man to a plurality of votes, then to be logical a money value should entitle Jay Gould or Barea Rothchild, by "right" of property to have a casting vote for a nation.  If the possession of property means moral right carring political power, if inequality among men is one of the Natures most sacred laws, intended to be upheld by humdnity at any cost, at any surrender of ethetical ideals, then re-establish feudality with its chattel @, and give once more to the most masterful and brutal the thousand and one personal claims of the lord over his creature.

 

            Those who talk of inequality conferring propertienate rights forget that there are two individuals to be considered--the natural man and the ethical man.  The natural man is a selfish savage, the ethical man combines with other of his kind in a society, founds a government, and surrenders certain instinctive claims for the good of the whole.  Such a society is made up of the thriftless and the worthless and the worthless as well as the thrifty and the worthy, and consequently and average has to be struck so that the government shall represent the State and not a section of it.  New, under a democratic government, moral right is as much recognized: as the law of demand and supply.  The demoratic governemt is an amplification of the family.  Its functions is the are of all its children, so that no one shall have undue advantage over another.

 

            To favor the wealthy, the prosperous, the thrifty, the inheritors of certain instincts which alone are sufficient to protect them against the competition of those not similarly endowed, is to handicap in the same proportion the poor, the needy and the unfortunate.  Every crumb piled upon the plate of him who bath @s a crumb stolen form the mouth of Lazarus.  The true mother protects her weakest offspring against the aggressions of the rest.  The ideal State is that one in which the possession of mere life is the sole claim to any right to any kind, political or social.  Instead of any increase in political power as a reward for the conservation of wealth, Democry demand absorbtion by the State of that wealth in order that political power shall not accrete in the hands of the few, and government thus become the rule of a caste or a section over the entire community. In other words, Democracy is a political machine for correcting the inevualities attributed to Eatural Order.

 

Canadian Annexation.

 

            Some of the Canadian politicians now say that the annexation question -- i.e., political fusion of Canada with the United States involves a civil war.  We don't believe there will be any war.  We believe that Canada will run off with the United States just in the same natural manner as a woman elopes with another woman's husband.  But civil war anyhow is the least abominable kind of military strife inasmuch as it must be disrected, more or less, by popular inpulses and express the rival wills of two strong sections of one people. Moreover civil war, by localising human suffering, tends to keep it limited, as commared with the woe that results form, say, a France-German slaughter, because if a son shoots his father when his father hadpens to the shooting him, they leave only one weeping widow and mother between them: whereas for every brace of unrelated corpse there must be two separate lots of family bereavements.  Also the corpses in the one instance have the satisfaction of knowing that they died at their own voluntary rish for a principle they knew something of, which in the other case they peg out with @erable conviction that that they didn't want to fight from the begining and if they did they were ignorant of any reason for wanted to.  These last remarks apply only to comm@ private soldiers who make "military glory," not to the men who give the order and scoop all the glory after it is made.

 

The Memory of Cook.

 

            The stigma -- as well reiterated by missionary chronicles, that Captain Cook "deserved and brought upon himself the death which he suffered" stands without a partide of evidence to support it.  It may be con@ded that the great navigator was all un@ paid divine ho@; but to say that he en@ it or gave reign in a spirit of law@, is to assert what eanned be supported by an @ots of re@ inference, to my nothing of evidence.  In no other part of the Pacific where Captain Cook was better known, would such a statement be listened to.  The fact is that manufactured slander on Captain Cook's memory, has become a dogma and like many another fabrication has taken rest and cannot be erased without discrediting the missionary historians who have been the great navigator's traducers.

            Captain Cook spent much of his time in the South Pacific Ocean, around New Zealand and Australia, and from Bass' Straits on the South to Torres Straits in the Nort of the Great Australian Continent where the record of his deeds is that of a humane man.  He spent months at one place, Morcombe Bay, in the North of Queensland, where one of his many ships the "Endeavour" was beached for repairs, and it is recorded that he treated the savage native most humanely.

 

ON DIT.

 

            That from the attitude of the Bulletin against annexation because opium smuggling will be stopped, the inference is that that sheet has an interest in opium smuggling.

 

            That the KA LEO writer openly charged the Opium Investigation Committee, while a member of the last Legislature of collusion, and for that reason, on his motion, a new Committee was appointed, but the House did not consider it expe@ to give the mover a chane to be on a special Committee, and thus the affair was shoved on to the Judiciary Committee which, with one or two exceptions, was composed of the old investigating committee.

 

            That Kalakaua with all of his faults, was never guilty of cutting a private gate through the Palace wail, for the purpose of the facilitaing doughtful assignatious.  How the times change, and the manners with them.

 

            That the spectacle of a South Sea Islander, sitting in the rear lanai of her Majesty's boud@ir at her Waikiki Seaside Cottage, in her night dress. (a little more that the simple malo) in the early morning, is too suggestive to be strictly @fying to the respectable element @ the community, who are @ to pass that way. If the thing must exist, is it nessessary that they should be @ publicly paraded?

 

            That soliders are kept on duty at Waikiki, to guard the Queen; and to move trouble, she has lived at Waikiki Beach, where a sand-bag barricade can be thrown up without much labor.

            That the @ @ @ Committee @ the opium @ @ @ the last Legislature @ @ @ @ducted," as the Bulletin would make out, "by the very man @ @ supported by KA LEO."  That the Honorable Member from Koolaupoke, (@ editor of KA LEO) did more to appoint a Special Committee to refer further investigation into the Opium Stealing which the first Committee had kindly covered over, but that did not suit the spirits of the House then, any more than it suits the Bulletin at anytimes, because if would have pissed a Member on the new Committee, which KA LEO supports and can TRUST.

 

            That there has been another advent in the @ app@ one of the Fort Street @-- Congratulations, Gov.--but isn't it a little irregular?  Or have you by long indulgence, acquired a prescriptive right to engage in such piscadilioes?

 

            That another tragedy in two parts was performed that other day, between two Amazons, on account of the King of Dahomey.  The story is to be published in book form, by the Bulletin Company, under the title of Taurus: or Who Shall Have Him.

 

            That the meeting at the Armory last Thursday was full and orderly and the Hawaiians encored every speaker that favored annexation, and republicanism, showing a growing desire for a change of government.

 

            That the Bulletin says the sand-bag incident fell flat as a sensation in 'Frisco,"  We don't doubt it, as symptomes of such insanity are generally looked for, and are too ailly for a sensation.

 

            That the experience with the dredger "is working with promise," so says the Bulletin, which is the character of one of the contracting parties--Mahope.

 

Sugar Experiment.

 

            The Colonial Sugar Refining Co. of Sydney claims to have practically solved the sugar enigma and to have proved the Central Mill system.  Its estate of Homebush near Mackay Noth Queensland, has benn split up into small sugar farms.  Each tenant signs two documents a lease and an agreement.  The lease is for five years, with the right of purchase at any time within three years--one fifth cash and four annual instalments; price for bush land five dollars an acre and for cultivated land twenty five dollars per acre.  The agreement simply binds the farmer to grow a certain quantity of cane and patronise the Company's mill.  The Company pays three and a half dollars per ton for cane; when the area in @00 acres, it will pay twelve had a half cents a tons more: at @00 acres twenty-five cents an acre more.

            Advanced for food are made if required, and in @ @ @ and implaments are supplied on terms. Applications are @ numerous that the company can pick its tenants.  An Australian paper commenting on this new solution of the sugar problem says "@ labor is not at all necessary to preserve the sugar industry.  Neither is black or yellow laber needed in the Northern Teritory in spite of im@dent @tions to the @rary."