Hawaii Holomua, Volume III, Number 167, 23 February 1893 — IT WILL COME TO GRIEF! [ARTICLE]

IT WILL COME TO GRIEF!

The news of the revolutionary overthrow of the Hawaiian government comes to our people like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Avoiding details as much as possible let us see, if we can what this revolution is and what it means. At the date of this writing—Saturday evening January 28th, 1893— there is nothing before us from which to glean intelligence of the late startling denouement at Honolulu but the Boston Herald's. San Francisco, and Washington correspondence uncomplemented by even a line of editorial comment in that journal. Queen Liliuokalani is dethroned! By her own people? No, by “foreigners;'’ for so the dispatch reads and repeats the word again and again. And these foreigners are—would you believe it? Americans, from the United States! In three days — from the 15th to the 18th—they dethroned the Queen, established a Provisional Government, and on the 19th, started commissioners to Washington to ask our government to annex the Sandwich Islands to the United States! This commission consists of Lorrin A. Thurston, William C. Wilder, Wllliam R. Castle, Charles T. Carter, and Joseph Marsden. Mr. Thurston, head of the commission, was interviewed at the Occidental

HoteI, San Francisco, and is reported as saying among other things: "Our mission is to secure annexation to the United States. We want no protectorate nor no republic. A republic would be worse than a monarchy; for then the ignorant Kanaka would rule!" In the very next breath he is made to say: "I may say the foreigners are unanimous in favor of annexation as the only hope for Hawaii." Now who are these American revolutionists? They are merchants, traders, specuIators, Louisiana lottery gamblers and men of such kith and kin who have for years been conniving at and perfecting plans for the subjugation of the Sandwich Islands to the control of a ruthless oligarchy of which themselves are the front and centre, and greed of gain is the animating soul! But, as if there were an understanding between themselves and co-conspirators at Washington high in authority, they have on hand to aid them in their nefarious plot the United States Steamship Boston which the dispatch says landed 300 men fully armed to aid and abet them in enforcing their usurped authority! But, just as gentlemen-villains always do in order to condone themselves for mean and wicked acts, they charge the blame upon another—the Queen—a woman! For—. "It is claimed," says the report that the first intimation of trouble came Jan. 15th, when Liliuokalani tried to get her cabinet (which is composed chiefly if not altogether of Americans) to sign a new constitution that disfranchised all foreigners and put the whole government in the hands of the native politicians. Small is the wonder she should wish to do this! but this they refused to do. She could but remember that the constitution she wished to abrogate was the one which these same foreigners had forced upon her brother in 1887, the late King Kalakaua and which contained concessions which were as dangerous to the safety and welfare of her people as they were also odious to them. In direct terms the history of this act of violence charges it upon "the foreign element" in these words: "In 1887, the foreign element which is the head and shoulders of the whole commercial and political life of the kingdom called upon King Kalakaua and persuaded him in half an hour to sign a constitution divesting himself, and the royal family of many rights which up to that time they had taken advantage of." What sort of "persuasion" was used, of what "rights" the royal house was divested and what concessions were made to "the foreigners" is artfully kept back by this historian, for he too, of course, is a "foreigner." Besides the facts already cited it is evident from many statements in the Heraldʻs dispatch that this coup d’etat of the "foreigners" had been for a long time in contemplation. Instance the following which the Heraldʻs dispatch quotes as coming from the lips of Ex-Senator Gorham D. Gilman who has, for many years, been familiar with Hawaiian affairs: "The constitution," he observed, "was that of 1887, which during the political troubles in the reign of the late King culminated in the reform party (that is the foreigners) forcing from him concessions which he was loth to make and which became incorporated in the new constitution." And a little further on he says: "We can see that the result would be that the dissatisfaction which has been gradually increasing especially among those connected

with the planting interest has brought a crisis. But these revolutionists—these "foreigners"—these American filibusters—want no protectorate nor no republic; "for a republic they declare would be worse than a monarchy; for then the ignorant kanakas would rule!" So it would seem that “the ignorant kanakas" are already intelligent enough to have well discovered the difference between their friends and their enemies—between their own people and a horde of rapacious usurping "foreigners!" In those few words of Mr. Thurston is revealed in all its bareness the essential and unspeakable rascality underlying this most atrocious and heaven-defying scheme for Hawaiian annexation! For if, as they declare, they "want no protectorate nor no republic." in the name of all the gods at once what do they want? The genius and spirit of our government—as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the constitution which was its logical sequence—is Justice, Liberty, Equality. Justice equal and impartial to all; Liberty bridled by the golden law which recognizes the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of men; Equality not merely before the law but equity in all the dealings of man with man so far as human laws can properly define them, according each to other the full measure of his rights to all the bounties of nature. and the helpful aids of the whole body politic. It is evident therefore that these foreigners want nothing which just and lawful government implies. It is clear that they do want something which it is not in the constitutional power of our government to give. They want annexation; but they do not want what must necessarily result from it, namely "fifteenth amendment" annexation —a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They present to our people, the glaring anomaly in government, of a large body of piratical outlaws entering into a country, deposing its sovereign. taking the government in their own hands and estabwishing an odious tyranny over the people, allowing them no voice whatever in the laws which are henceforth to govern them; and then asking a Republic like ours to make the excrescence an annex of our government! Could audacity and black-browed villany farther go? What they really do want we know a great deal better than they dare tell us. They want as we have already above suggested. what by treacherous usurpation they have already begun to establish under some of the appearances of law; namely an oligarchy—a hateful, oppressive, irresponsible oligarchy, and for no other purpose than for the enslavement of the natives—the poor dependent classes of the Sandwich Islands— that they may thereby enrich and glorify themselves! They expect to accomplish this by having those islands incorporated by our government as a territorial annex governed by a commission of their own nomination. After that they will do the rest! make or procure what laws they will for their own advantage; and being too far away to be much known or cared after by "the rest of mankind," and permitted to do about as they please by our honorable (!) patriotic (!) congress. for the cries of their oppressed victims to be much heard, with always money enough to purchase lawmakers, and the silence or friendship of the great dailies, to carry through any legislative iniquity they may desire and with the military ever within call to help them enforce it—take it all togather what a picnic—what a heavenly state of things they will have all to themselves: Such may be their dream; but whether they be able to enlist our debauched government in their golden scheme or not, as certain as there is a just and righteous God in Heaven. in the very near future it will come to grief; and they and all their wicked accomplices along with it! Mark the words: It will come to grief!