Hawaii Holomua, Volume III, Number 170, 2 March 1893 — REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? [ARTICLE]

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE!

The issue raised on the annexation of the Hawaiian lslands is distinctly an issue between a republican and an imperial form of government. It is the same question now that it was when Grant, in the zenith of his power, attempted to force the annexation of San Domingo. Grant failed and this attempt will also fail, but Grant’s attempt developed the fact that a very considerable portion of the population of this country are at heart lmperialists, ready to surrender control to the Plutocracy at home the better to extend the confines of the country through the conquest of weaker neighbors. UndoubtedIy the attempt now being made is even more dangerous than the attempt made under Grant. The annexation policy has been preached for several years in New York papers, and there can be no doubt that plans were fully matured before Queen Liliuokalani was made a prisoner and the islands seized by the gang. As long ago as the 24th of last November the Kennebec “Journal,” the paper edited by Stevens, the Harrison Minister at Honolulu,

had an editorial on the advantages likely to accrue from seizing them; and the San Francisco dispatches of yesterday show that Spreckels has just completed a deal by which he has “frozen out" his small stockholders as a preparation for the "annexation policy,” through which he has already boomed the stock enormously on the strength of the expectation, that he will get his plantations into the United States, so that his sugar will come in for the McKinley bounty. Of course, if we wish to seize these islands and enslave their people we can do it. We can take them first and then go on to take Mexico, Canada, and Central America. It will cost at least several hundred thousand lives to adopt the Imperial policy. That, however, might be no such great matter were it the worst, but the results of the fighting will be far worse than the fighting itself. We have a million pensioners now. We will have five million if we allow the Imperialists to drag us with them in the direction in which they are carried by the stupidity of their selfishness and the blindness of their desire to make themselves masters of those who are too weak to resist successfully. Hawaii now will mean Canada and Mexico next, and with Imperialsim once inaugurated, the Pretorian element, made powerful by the ascendancy of the force we will use against our weaker neighbors, will completely master the country and set up its own creatures as tyrants over the people. It will not cost a very great effort at present to rob a few thousand Polynesians. We can "annex” them and their leper colony, take their land away from them and then make them citizens, or, if they are restive, deal with them as Messrs. Noble and Harrison dealt with the Indians when the Gatling guns were turned down the gulch in which their squaws and papooses were huddled together on the Wounded Knee. But we have blood enough on our hands. Our invasion of Mexico and our spoilation of that weak country cost us our Civil War and money and lives enough to pay for a hemisphere. And it is not to be doubted that if we yield now to the aroused and aggressive spirit of Imperialism it will force us from one war of conquest to another until a great empire is formed by the destruction of our liberty and the liberty of our neighbors. We cannot afford to seize these islands!