These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear.  It was easy to remember them; and useful.  For the penalty for infringing any rule in the whole list was death.  Those women easily learned to put up with shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so expensive.

It was death for any one to walk upon tabu’d ground; or defile a tabu’d thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon the king’s shadow.  The nobles and the King and the priests were always suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near.  The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those days.

Thus advantageously was the new king situated.  Will it be believed that the first thing he did was to destroy his Established Church, root and branch?  He did indeed do that.  To state the case figuratively, he was a prosperous sailor who burnt his ship and took to a raft.  This Church was a horrid thing.  It heavily oppressed the people; it kept them always trembling in the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them in sacrifice before its grotesque idols of wood and stone; it cowed them, it terrorized them, it made them slaves to its priests, and through the priests to the king.  It was the best friend a king could have, and the most dependable.  To a professional reformer who should annihilate so frightful and so devastating a power as this Church, reverence and praise would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly be due nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow; sorrow for his unfitness for his position.

He destroyed his Established Church, and his kingdom is a republic today, in consequence of that act.

When he destroyed the Church and burned the idols he did a mighty thing for civilization and for his people’s weal—­but it was not “business.”  It was unkingly, it was inartistic.  It made trouble for his line.  The American missionaries arrived while the burned idols were still smoking.  They found the nation without a religion, and they repaired the defect.  They offered their own religion and it was gladly received.  But it was no support to arbitrary kingship, and so the kingly power began to weaken from that day.  Forty-seven years later, when I was in the islands, Kainehameha V. was trying to repair Liholiho’s blunder, and not succeeding.  He had set up an Established Church and made himself the head of it.  But it was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble, an empty show.  It had no power, no value for a king.  It could not harry or burn or slay, it in no way resembled the admirable machine which Liholiho destroyed.  It was an Established Church without an Establishment; all the people were Dissenters.

Long before that, the kingship had itself become but a name, a show.  At an early day the missionaries had turned it into something very much like a republic; and here lately the business whites have turned it into something exactly like it.