Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 201, 26 May 1891 — THAT WASHINGTON MISSION. [ARTICLE]

THAT WASHINGTON MISSION.

The loeal press has bcen remark- j :ib!y poor for the last year or so, ;ith1 thc Lko is the only paper that < omes out regularly witb. genuine orginal editorials- on all matters of public interest; the other loeal «vl itors seem to have exhausted all iheir brains.—they never had mueh, —and ean think of loeal subjects to write about only after finding them already aīluded to in the Leo. Thus, ourstudy of our foreign missi©ns stirred up the old fossi!s in the P. (\ Advertiser> and brought out irom tliem some interesting eonfossions, coupled with un necessary i!ttaeks. But we are so accustemed to tbe christian organ ; s tactics, that we cannot be surprised that the writer-ot the Advertiser, born and l)red in the odoriferous mire of dirty personalities and sanctimonious j misrepresentations. sbould not have been able to avoid faliing into uncalled for personal abuse about the Samoan Mission, whieh was quite out of the question, unlessl as an occasion for spatting some inocuous venom against the editor of the Leo, who is not a candidate for any government employ. The Advertiser says that to fill the Ministerial position at Washington, it U requires not only first olass diplomatic ability, acquired by long experience, but personal inūuenee whieh may be exerted .vhen occasion calls for it, in behalf of the country represented." In view of obtaining this k4 personal :nfiuence," it appears according to the .Advcrtm'Ss statement," "'that the expenses are enormous, the ■-•'lan/ hanUy corsringt;the expenses of maintaining the liāwaiian Legation at Washington varying from $12,000 to $20,000 a year," and a in 1889 amounting to $23,000," "the mmister has to live and entertain like a prince, and few have the ability to do this, unless possessed of outside sources of ineome." .send a person from here, to depend on his salary ©f $5000 a year, is perfectly ridiculous and would soon end in disgrace to himself and his sovereign.". ... Now it appears that, for the Advertiser.crowd, the main ideal of a minister at Washington is to Iiveand entertain as a "pnnee." That may have been the ideal of Mr. Carter, who wanted to gratify i his unquenchable vanity and perhaps marry out his sons and daughters by such pyrotechnic display of ostentatious foolery, and he might have spent $50,0C»0 a year for such purposes, if he chose; but such is not our ideal of t ne mis8ion. The peopleof Hawaii do not send a representative to Washington to junket around, give dinners and drink champagne with the dissipated crowd of loafers whieh always agglomerato *irx eapitals, but to stand as a solid politieal sentinel to watch for and defend our intcrc8t8 in governtne<it circles by day, not in nocturual banqueting.. X9 tba.i&fluence i\ud

power of oth er forei gn representative at Washington measured by the * amount spent on entertainments ? in that case the "inAiieoee" of the French, English, German powers must be quite diminutive, for none spent as mueh as Mr. Carter saw fit to do. At any rate, even if $23,000 were spent by Mr. Carter in 1889, for diners and parties, of what good has that been to us, in Hawaii ? Did it prevent the McKinley Bill from ruin our sugar industry ? And woukl we have bared ā bit worse, had that money not been spent ? Wo say that our Minister has been *the laughing-stock of the Americans for his extravagantly ostentatious expenditures, and all th.e political men there, would confer mueh more respect and consideration, even more -'personal influence, ,, to a modest maivniorestrictly attached to his political duties than to pleasure seeking. Whatever the past may have been, however, the days of the supposed necessity for ,( personal in« Auenee" (idest junketing influenee,) in our representative at t\ T ashington are passed. Entertainments did not save us from the McKinle3 r tariff, they will not be needed anylonger in the future, when the necessary change of our commercial relations will make it more iuaportant to have representatives in Canada and Australia than at Washington. The Adcertiser may thus feel relieved of its anxiety as to the ehoiee of a man •eapahle of entertaining "like a prince" outside of the liberal salary already granted by the people of Hawaii for their minister at Washington. And, if it really be proved that it is impossible for anv reasonable man to live there. on that salary, then it will be as well for the next legislature to suppress that (ffice, considcring of what }ittle benefit it has been to the country at large, out side of the sugar ring.