Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 270, 1 September 1891 — Page 4

KA LEO O KA LAHUI.

"E Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono."

 

KA LEO.

John E. Bush.

Luna Hooponopono a me Puuku.

 

Tuesday, Sept, 1 1891.

 

A Stunted Statesman.

 

In the San Francisco Evening Bulletin of Aug. 20, under the heading of “Pele’s Islands,” – appears what purports to be an interview with Mr. L. A. Thurston, who aspired to be the head of the Cabinet, (in fact, the whole Cabinet) of the late revolutionary regime. – While the article bears all the Thurstonian earmarks, it is apparently not an “interview,” in the ordinary sense of the term, but an essay on the Hawaiian situation, written out by Mr. Thurston and handed in for publication.

The prospects of the planters as might have been expected, form the chief topic of his discourse, and therein he states, with probable accuracy, that the revenue of the barons will shrink from the $13,000,000 figure which was realized from the last crop, to $8,000,000 for the crop soon to be harvested, -- thus showing a decline in the profits of the barons, of $5,000,000, upon one year’s operations under the McKinley bill, as compared with the preceding year, when the American tax payer was paying them a clear bonus of forty odd dollars per ton upon their project.

It is hard to work up any sympathy for the Yankee, English, Scotch Irish and Dutch sugar magnates who, with less than a half-dozen of Hawaiian blood, (mostly rengades to their race and country) constitute the so-called planting interest of these Islands.  They have, for fifteen years past fattened upon the charity of Uncle Sam, -- and have repaid the generosity of America by purchasing every possible pound of produce and piece of machinery in British and German markets, except when the American market offered greater advantages.  We will cite the instance of the purchase, in Germany of his entire milling plant, (worth in the neighborhood of $150,000) by that rampant, spread-eagle, fourth-of-July American patriot, Col. Z. S. Spalding, of the Makee Sugar co., Kauai.  The plant for the yet uncompleted mill at Makaweli, in which missionary Boldwin is the gaiding star, is to come, or has come from great Britain.  Plenty more such instances, but no space for citation.

It is evident to the residents of the Islands that Mr. Thurston’s review of the sugar prospects, as contained in the San Francisco paper, is more helpful and sanguine than the conditions will warrant, -- and that, while a majority of the plantations will go deeply into debt, as a result of their operations in 1891-2, few or none of them will pay respectable dividends, and many will be obliged to suspend entirely while the cane now growing is harvested.  Mr. Thurston admits that fully 20 per cent of the plantations will be frozen out if present conditions continue, -- an estimate much below what is warranted by facts.

But the amusing feature of our great statesman’s interview, is the remedy which he proposes for the losses resulting to our industries from the McKinley bill.  He does not unfold his colossal and dazzling scheme with undue precipitation, but holds back the most sublime and stupendous feature of the remedy until all other probable and possible schemes have been discussed and discarded, -- been weighed in the balance and found wanting,--Thus, before finally unmasking his awful battery of political and industrial expedients, he review’s the hopes to be founded upon the Presidential power to soon reimpose the sugar duties upon the product of such countries as do not promptly come into the reciprocity net so cleverly spread for them by Mr. Blaine.  But the darling and dazzling genius of Haleakala, in this, as in other particulars wherein our interests are bound up in the course of American politics, has shown himself unable to read the open book of accomplished facts,--not to mention the half-open scroll of probabilities.  With a treachery of memory for which he made himself famous, (or the reverse) while in office here, our great political luminary forgets or ignores the fact that the sugar product of the countries with which Uncle Sam has already concluded reciprocity treaties, under the McKinley act-probably Brazil and Cuba, is more than sufficient, in conjunction with the Hawaiian and home product, to supply the American market.

Of what adventage to us, then, if President Harrison should exercise his power in that direction, and reimpose the old rate of duty upon the sugar of every other country under the sun?  The supply from Louisiana, California, Hawaii, Cuba, Brazil and such other states as shall by that time be included in the reciprocity fraternity will exceed the American demand, and though America should not thereafter receive a pound of sugar from other lands, the result to us will be the same as now, for we will still be competition with enough of the countries of chaper production than we can attain, to keep us, for all practical purposes, upon a plane of equality with all the sugar countries of the world.

Having canvassed the foregoing ground, and professed to the extraction of some comfort of our sugar planters therefrom, though not sufficient to satisfy their known insatiable appetites in that direction, our gifted son uncorked his real simon-pure panacea for Hawaii’s ills, and gave the San Francisco journalist a taste of the saccharine compound, and what d’ye s’pose the bottle contained?  Why,--pineapple preserves, and guava jelly!  Auwe!

This is how our western Bismarck proposes to fill the “aching void” now existing in the sugar camp.  He says this government is “committed” to an attempt to secure “complete reciprocity”—(meaning, of course, free trade), with the United States.  We will take the liberty of asking our romancing traveler when, where, by and before whom, by what authority and under what circumstances the “Hawaiian Government” was so “committed?”  If the “commitment” has been made, it was not done in open court, but must have been the work of some missionary cabal, executed in midnight session,--and that Mr. Thurston ought to be an authority an such matters, we cheerfully admit.  If by the term “Hawaiian Government” our reputed statesman means the present Cabinet,--there we protest against its being “committed” to anything, -- unless to political oblivion.  It is illegal to “commit” a nuisance.

And so, under the beneficient provisions of free trade with the United States, our myriad-minded economist from the wilds of Haleakala proposes to export to the American market those two toothsome delicacies, pineapple preserves and guava jelly, -- and thus to bridge the abyss into which the country has fallen through a reduction of $5,000,000 in its annual revenue.  What a stupendous idea!  How eminently worthy of the colossal brain that gave it birth.  How Uncle Sam’s mouth, -- if not his eyes – will water, when he beholds that scintillating star of occidental politics, -- our own and only Thurston – approaching the American capital with a jar of pineapple preserves under one arm, -- a tumbler of guava jelly under the other, a dried banana slung round his neck, a luscious tomato in his mouth, and a high and holy purpose in either eye, bent upon a career of diplomatic triumphs that will not only place a sample of each of those succulent sweets upon every table in the land, but will, at one brilliant stroke, retrieve the fallen fortunes of Hawaii nei, and more than atone for our annual loss of five millions, involved in the insignificant and picayune sugar trade!  Ye Gods, little fishes, and littler politicians gaze upon the scene, and weep, that no such sublime ideas of the limtless possibilities of pineapple preserves and guava jelly have every been vouchsafed to your cramp and dwarfish minds.

So no bring forth the crown of roses, twine the “blooming” chaplet round his dome of thought, and enthrone this useful marvel on the Olympian seat, or, if you are just out of Olympic seats, what’s the matter with a lava crag on the summit of Haleakala, whence this darling of the young and watery west, -- this idol of the occidental tropics—can conveniently oversee the operations in his pineapple patch?

But a sadder thought occurs to us.  Can it be that his lately acquired proprietory right in the hash-house on the hill, at Kilauea, has unsettled our friend’s stupenduous intellect, and dwarfed his ideas, from the measure of hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar to that of pineapple preserves and guava jelly by the glass?  The gods of preserves and politics forbid that the Honorable Guava Jelly Thurston should be so affected.

We will review, at a later date, Mr. Thurston’s compliments to the editor and policy of this journal, as contained in the interview referred to.

 

The Cheap Laborer.

 

It is astonishing to find in every cli@@@ where sugar is grown, how the planting fraternity are on the same hunt after government and in importing the “cheap laborer.”  In Queensland as in Hawaii, the planter wants cheap labor to “develope the resources of the country.”  It has also been decided, as usual, that the white man can’t work in that sultry land; and therefore as the Chinaman is prohibited and the coolie has been tried with results that were a trifle worse than open insurrection, and the South Sea laborer was abolished some time ago to make an election advertisement for the “Great Liberal Party,” a rump of that same party being now in power, the government is now engaged in the importation of Italians as the handiest method of filling the gap.

The men they want are the hardy peasants of Piedmont, reared under the shadow of the snow-clad Alps, and by some extraordinary efforts of hard lying it is assumed that these exiles from the land of the glacier are fitted to fill the bill beyond the tropic of Capricorn.  What the sugar capitalist—whether in Queensland or Hawaii—wants, is not local born tropical labor, but cheap labor, cheap ignorance, and cheap slavery, and this whole labor problem is based on a self-evident falsehood.  The ostensible reason given for the importation of Asiatics in Hawaii is that the white man and the Hawaiian cannot do the work required in the cane field, but they can both do any kind of work and do it anywhere.  Either race will toil in the region of Greenland or on the Gaboon river in equatorial Africa—provided the pay is commensurate—and they are better fitted to toil on a tropical plantation than either the Chinaman or the Jap, or even the negro: and the theory that these “inferior races” can labor where the Aryan cannot is a hollow lie from beginning to end.  Sugar has been and is being successfully raised in New South Wales for half a century, without the aid of Chinese or contract labor of any description.

 

The Bulletin’s Inconsistensies.

 

That wonderful self-styled “orb” who, in its frantic attempts to ( mis ) lead public opinion, begins to realize that it does not “reflect” anything at all, outside of the incoherent twaddle of its couple of disappointed editors or sore-head shareholders, that ignominious failure of a newspaper, the Bulletin, has not heard of ,since its last effort against KA LEO that effort exhausted their tiny brains.  and the famishing public are therefore reduced to blank editorials on the coffee cup as a barometer, or on Consul Smith’s Apocryphal effusion on the condition of a kingdom he does not know anything about.

To keep the Bulletin before the public, it is therefore necessary to go back to past issues and to gather up the exhilarating crop of funny things which escape from the “orb’s” inkstand, when its editors attempt to dabble into editorial compositions.

In its issue of August 12 ^th the Bulletin published the following memorable admission:  “the only man who was beaten at the polls of an otherwise highly triumphant ticket, presuming to set himself up as a tribune of the people, is a novel sight in constitutional politics!!”  And so it is, right you are Moses!  But pray, who is that man?  Why!  the editor of the Bulletin’s tribune, of course, Dan Logan, who was so disgracefully defeated in Maui, in spite of his having assumed for the time being, he colors of the National Party!  Such was his popularity, and such his success in trying to “load public opinion when public opinion did not want to be lead by him!”  And this confession comes from his own paper!  Rough, is it not?

The Bulletin indignantly repudiates the accusation that it is “on the fence”—“with regard to any existing question, but ready to express a candid opinion on such, when seasonable.”  We are happy to record the bold (and bald) assertion, but the trouble with the Bulletin is that it never knows when it may be “seasonable” to express an opinion:  it is exceedingly careful not to be out of season, so as not to loose some advertising patronage, and therefore, although always ready to express an opinion, candid or otherwise, it never does risk it out, except when there is absolutely no danger.  That may be very good financial policy, but it certainly deserves to be called a “on the fence” policy, and the public so calls it.

The Bulletin terms “snarling or sneering” every thing said or written not in accord with its own @ line of “seasonable” opinions.  And it does not like to be sneered or snarled at!  Dignified little minds, self-assumed infallible men, would-be oracles, tribunes or leaders of the public never like sneers, and we are inclined to think that they are quite right, in their way; but unfortunately the public enjoys just sneering and healthy snarling against presumptuous fops, and the funny thing is that the Bulletin men just do unto others what they do not like to be done unto them.  Oh, consistency, you are a jewel!  But more anon.

 

Foreign Items.

 

The Sims-Edison electric fish torpedo was tested off New York on the 11 ^th instant.  The torpedo is operated by electricity through a cable from shipboard.  It was sent out for two miles, performed many evolutions at the will of the operator, and returned to the ship.  The naval and military experts were enthusaistic in their praise.  It bids fair to revolutionise naval warfare.

Arnold White, the chief agent of Baron Hirsch, who is doing so much for the Jews, says that Russia has been greatly defamed in the reports concerning the treatment of the Jews.  Speaking of Palestine as a land of promise for the Jews, Mr. White said that he had great objections to it, first, on account of the climate for those reared in the North and, secondly, he thought Russia would possess it sometime in the future.

The British authorities have been investigating the causes of the late insubordination in the army.  The result has been the discovery that an active socialistic propaganda has been going on in the army for some time.  An attempt to forcibly repress it will eventually feed the flames.  When the great powers of Europe find the flower of their army rebellious, they cannot be expected to continue lead much longer.  Socialism, Anarchism, and Nihilism were never more alive then now.