he sea, but keep in the large fish. Many of these ponds
are hundreds of acres in area, and from them the Hawaiian draws one of
his favorite dishes. Then there may be cocoa-nuts; there are sure to be
bananas and guavas. Beef costs but a trifle, and hogs fatten on taro. The
pandanus furnishes him material for his mats, and of mats he makes his
bed, as well as the floor of his house.

In short, such a gorge or valley as I have tried to describe to you
furnishes in its various parts, including the sea-shore, all that is
needed to make the Hawaiian prosperous; and I have not seen one which
had not its neatly kept school-house and church, and half a dozen framed
houses scattered among the humbler grass huts, to mark the greater wealth
of some--for the Hawaiian holds that the wooden house is a mark of thrift
and respectability.

But the same valley which now supports twenty or thirty native families in
comfort and happiness, and which, no doubt, once yielded food and all the
appliances of life in abundance to one or two hundred, would not tempt any
white man of any nation in the world to live in it, and a thousand such
gorges would not add materially to the prosperity of any white nation.
That is to say, the country is admirably adapted to its native people.
It favors, as it doubtless compelled and formed, all their habits and
customs. But it would repel any one else, and an American farmer would not
give a hundred dollars for the whole Wailuku Valley--if he had to live in
it and work it--though it would be worth many thousands to the natives if
it were once more populous as of old.

As you examine the works of the old Hawaiians, their fish ponds, their
irrigation canals, their long miles of walls inclosing ponds and taro
fields, you will not only see the proofs that the Islands were formerly
far more populous than now, but you will get a respect for the feudal
system of which these works are the remains.

The Hawaiian people, when they first became known to the world, were
several stages removed from mere savagery. They had elaborated a tolerably
perfect system of government and of land tenure, which has since been
swept away, as was inevitable, but which served its day very well indeed.
Under this system the chiefs owned every thing. The common people were
their retainers--followers in war and servants in peace. The chief,
according to an old Hawaiian proverb, owned "all the land, all the sea,
and all the iron cast up by