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 the sea.”

[Illustration:  HAWAIIAN WARRIORS.]

The land was carefully parceled out among the chiefs, upon the plan of securing to each one from his own land all that he and his retainers needed for their lives.  What they chiefly required was taro ground, the sea for fish, the mulberry for tapa, and timber land for canoes; but they required also ti leaves in which to wrap their parcels, and flowers of which to make their les, or flower necklaces.  And I have seen modern surveys of old “lands” in which the lines were run very irregularly, and in some cases oven outlying patches were added, because a straight line from mountain to sea was found to exclude some one product, even so trifling as the yellow flowers of which les are often made.

On such a “land,” and from it, the chief and his people lived.  He appears to have been the brains and they the hands to work it.  They owed him two days’ labor in every seven, in which they cultivated his taro, cleaned his fish pond, caught fish for him, opened paths, made or transported canoes, and did generally what he required.  The remainder of the time was their own, to cultivate such patches of taro as he allowed them to occupy, or to do what they pleased.  For any important public work he could call out all his people, and oblige them to labor as long as he chose, and thus were built the surprisingly solid and extensive walls which inclose the old fish ponds, and many irrigating canals which show not only long continued industry, but quite astonishing skill for so rude a people.

The chief was supreme ruler over his people; they lived by his tolerance, for they owned absolutely nothing, neither land, nor house, nor food, nor wife, nor child.  A high chief was approached only with abject gestures, and no one dared resist his acts or dispute his will.  The sense of obedience must have been very strong, for it has survived every change; and only the other day a friend of mine saw a Hawaiian lady, a chiefess, but the wife of an American, and herself tenderly nurtured and a woman of education