As the chief was the ruler, the people looked to him for food in a time of scarcity.  He directed their labors; he protected them against wrong from others; and as it was his pride that his retainers should be more numerous and more prosperous than those of the neighboring chief, if the head possessed brains, no doubt the people were made content.  Food was abundant; commerce was unknown; the chief could not eat or waste more than his people could easily produce for him; and until disturbing causes came in with Captain Cook, no doubt feudalism wrought satisfactory results here.  One wonders how it was invented among such a people, or who it was that first had genius enough to insist on obedience, to make rules, to prescribe the tabu, and, in short, to evolve order out of chaos.

The tabu was a most ingenious and useful device; and when you hear of the uses to which it was put, and of its effectiveness, you feel surprised that it was not found elsewhere as an appurtenance of the feudal machinery.  Thus the chief allowed his people to fish in the part of the ocean which he owned—­which fronted his “land,” that is to say.  He tabued one or two kinds of fish, however; these they were forbidden to catch; but as a fisherman can not, even in these islands, exercise a choice as to the fish which shall enter his net or bite at his hook, it followed that the tabued fish were caught—­but then they were at once rendered up to the chief.  One variety of taro, which makes poi of a pink color, was tabued and reserved for the chiefs.  Some birds were tabued on account of their feathers; one especially, a black bird which has a small yellow feather under each wing.  The great feather cloak of Kamehameha I., which is still kept as a sign of royalty, is made of these feathers, and contains probably several thousand of them, thus gathered, two from each bird.

Further, a tabu prohibited women from eating with men, even with their husbands; and when, on the death of the first Kamehameha, his Queen Kahumanu, an energetic and fearless virago, dared for the first time to eat with her son, a cry of horror went up as though “great Pan was dead;” and this bold act really broke the power of the heathen priests.

A tabu forbade women to eat cocoa nuts and some other articles of food; and the prohibition appears to have been used also to compel sanitary and other useful restraints, for I have been told that a tabu preserved girls from marriage until they had attained a certain age, eighteen, I believe; and to this and some other similar regulations, rigorously enforced in the old times, I have heard old residents attribute the fertility of the race before foreigners came in.

[Illustration:  KAMEHAMEHA I.]