one of the nine or ten islands that form the group.  But he did more than that.  He bought ships, freighted them with sandal wood and other native products, and sent them as far as South America and China; he sold to his savages the foreign stuffs and tools and utensils which came back in these ships, and started the march of civilization.  It is doubtful if the match to this extraordinary thing is to be found in the history of any other savage.  Savages are eager to learn from the white man any new way to kill each other, but it is not their habit to seize with avidity and apply with energy the larger and nobler ideas which he offers them.  The details of Kamehameha’s history show that he was always hospitably ready to examine the white man’s ideas, and that he exercised a tidy discrimination in making his selections from the samples placed on view.

A shrewder discrimination than was exhibited by his son and successor, Liholiho, I think.  Liholiho could have qualified as a reformer, perhaps, but as a king he was a mistake.  A mistake because he tried to be both king and reformer.  This is mixing fire and gunpowder together.  A king has no proper business with reforming.  His best policy is to keep things as they are; and if he can’t do that, he ought to try to make them worse than they are.  This is not guesswork; I have thought over this matter a good deal, so that if I should ever have a chance to become a king I would know how to conduct the business in the best way.

When Liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed of an equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a wiser king would have known how to husband, and judiciously employ, and make profitable.  The entire country was under the one scepter, and his was that scepter.  There was an Established Church, and he was the head of it.  There was a Standing Army, and he was the head of that; an Army of 114 privates under command of 27 Generals and a Field Marshal.  There was a proud and ancient Hereditary Nobility.  There was still one other asset.  This was the tabu—­an agent endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an agent not found among the properties of any European monarch, a tool of inestimable value in the business.  Liholiho was headmaster of the tabu.  The tabu was the most ingenious and effective of all the inventions that has ever been devised for keeping a people’s privileges satisfactorily restricted.

It required the sexes to live in separate houses.  It did not allow people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place.  It did not allow a man’s woman-folk to enter his house.  It did not allow the sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on them.  Then the women could eat what was left—­if anything was left—­and wait on themselves.  I mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort was left, the women could have it.  But not the good things, the fine things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the choicer varieties of fish, and so on.  By the tabu, all these were sacred to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering what they might taste like; and they died without finding out.