Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/424

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confinement and more exercise in the open air. But Dibble characteristically remarked : "It seems impossible to restrain [the pupils] from rude and romping behavior and to confine them to those exercises deemed more proper for females, without serious injury to health. To acquire at once habits of civilization, according to our notions of it, was evidently attended with great risk." A pious visitor who saw the boys eat dinner at Lahaina- luna Seminary related : " The meal was taken in perfect silence- rather a difficult requirement for a Hawaiian, but only the more necessary to be observed from their extremely loquacious habits." Even Ellis, one of the most liberal and broad-minded of mission- aries, after giving an account of the games and amusements of the Tahitians, added : "With the exception of one or two, they have all, however, been discontinued, especially among the adults ; and the number of those followed by the children is greatly diminished. This is, on no account, matter of regret." In 1836 the king and fourteen of the high chiefs and chiefesses of Hawaii, in a petition to the A. B. C. F. M. asking for more teachers, said : " These are the teachers whom we would specify : a carpenter, tailor, mason, shoemaker, wheelwright, papermaker, typefounder, agriculturists . . . . ; cloth manufacturers, and makers of machinery . . . . ; and a teacher of the chiefs in what pertains to the land according to the practice of enlightened countries." Unnecessary to say, the request was not granted, " nor was a compliance deemed of vital importance "by Rev. Dr. Anderson, the foreign secretary of the board. When the Hawai- ian people asked bread of their Christian brothers, they were not indeed given a stone, but food which was indigestible. Naturally they died.

Now it may be asked: What of the future ? Will the " dying out" process continue to the end? Jarvis in 1843 an< ^ again Anderson in 1863 gave figures and reasons tending to show that the crisis was then past, and that soon the tide of life would return. These anticipations, however, were not realized. Never- theless, at the present time, there are several circumstances which indicate, as never before, an enlarged and useful future for the Hawaiian people. Most significant is the fact that many of