And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu,
the chief dignitary of the “Established Church”—for
when the American Presbyterian missionaries had completed
the reduction of the nation to a compact condition
of Christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected
the grand dignity of an “Established (Episcopal)
Church” over it, and imported a cheap ready-made
Bishop from England to take charge. The chagrin
of the missionaries has never been comprehensively
expressed, to this day, profanity not being admissible.
Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction.
Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii,
etc., and after them a string of High Sheriffs
and other small fry too numerous for computation.
Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary
and Minister Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty
the Emperor of the French; her British Majesty’s
Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States;
and some six or eight representatives of other foreign
nations, all with sounding titles, imposing dignity
and prodigious but economical state.
Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house “kingdom”
whose population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand
souls!
The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles
and colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes
very little more stir in Honolulu than a Western Congressman
does in New York.
And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly
defined “court costume” of so “stunning”
a nature that it would make the clown in a circus
look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each Hawaiian
official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced
uniform peculiar to his office—no two of
them are alike, and it is hard to tell which one is
the “loudest.” The King had a “drawing-room”
at stated intervals, like other monarchs, and when
these varied uniforms congregate there—weak-eyed
people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked
glass. Is there not a gratifying contrast between
this latter-day exhibition and the one the ancestors
of some of these magnates afforded the missionaries
the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing?
Behold what religion and civilization have wrought!
While I was in Honolulu I witnessed the ceremonious
funeral of the King’s sister, her Royal Highness
the Princess Victoria. According to the royal
custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace
thirty days, watched day and night by a guard of honor.
And during all that time a great multitude of natives
from the several islands had kept the palace grounds
well crowded and had made the place a pandemonium every
night with their howlings and wailings, beating of
tom-toms and dancing of the (at other times) forbidden
“hula-hula” by half-clad maidens to the
music of songs of questionable decency chanted in
honor of the deceased. The printed programme
of the funeral procession interested me at the time;
and after what I have just said of Hawaiian grandiloquence
in the matter of “playing empire,” I am
persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the reader:
