indebted." There is also an additional security for the
institution in the following article, namely,--"Whenever a vacancy shall
occur in said corporation, it shall be the duty of the Trustees to fill
the same with all reasonable and convenient dispatch. And every new
election shall be immediately made known to the Prudential Committee of
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and be subject
to their approval or rejection, and this power of revision shall be
continued to the American Board for twenty years from the date of this
charter."

_The Sandwich Islands Christianized._

The effort to christianize the Sandwich Islands was begun in the year
1820, and has succeeded beyond any similar efforts recorded in history.
In the year 1853, a little more than thirty years from the commencement
of the mission, the Board was able to make proclamation in the Annual
Report, that the people of the Sandwich Islands had become a Christian
nation. The proofs then adduced of this fact were beyond all
controversy; such as entitled the Hawaiian nation to the Christian name,
if any people on earth might claim it; though without that intellectual
development and social culture, which enter so deeply into the modern
idea of civilization. But even in respect to these things a vast work
had been accomplished.

It was evident to the Prudential Committee, as early as the year 1848,
that the time had come for a change of some sort in the relations of the
missionaries to the people of the Islands and to the Board. They saw
that new and additional motives must be presented to induce the married
missionaries to remain at the Islands, or the greater part of them might
feel constrained to return to this country within a few years, to make
provision for their children. This was not owing simply, nor chiefly,
to the number and age of their children, (for such a result was nowhere
seen in the older missions elsewhere,) but to the novel and remarkable
relations, at that time, of the mission to the people of the Sandwich
Islands.

The problem, as then presented, was, how to give scope to the parental
feelings in missionaries, without increasing burdens and expenses that
could not be borne; though it soon appeared that there was really a
higher problem to be solved, and one that was novel in missions,
namely, how to bring the mission itself, as such, to a termination,
dissolving its relations to the Board, and merging its members i