University of Virginia Library

WHOSE CIRCUS IT WAS

It is reported that the King has said: "The foreigners like their religion—let them enjoy it, and freely. But the religion of my fathers is good enough for me." Now that is all right. At least I think so. And I have no fault to find with the natives for the lingering love they feel for their ancient customs. But I do find fault with Bishop Staley for reviving those customs of a barbarous age at a time when they had long been abandoned and were being forgotten—when one more generation of faithful adherence to the teachings of the American missionaries would have buried them forever and made them memories of the past—things to be talked of and wondered at, like the old laws that made it death for a plebeian to stand erect in the presence of his king, or for a man to speak to his wife on a tabu day—but never imitated.

For forty years before the bishop brought his Royal Hawaiian Established Reformed Catholic Church here, the kings and chiefs of this land had been buried with the quiet, simple, Christian rites that are observed in England and America, and no man thought of anything more being necessary. But one of the first things Bishop Staley did when he arrived here a few years ago was to write home that the missionaries had deprived the natives of their innocent sports and pastimes (such as the lascivious hula-hula, and the promiscuous bathing in the surf of nude natives of opposite sexes), and one of the next things he did was to attend a hula-hula at Waikiki with his holy head tricked out in the flower and evergreen trumpery worn by the hula girls. When the late king died, the bishop revived the half-forgotten howling and hula dancing and other barbarisms in the palace yard, and officiated there as a sort of master of ceremonies. For many a year before he came, that wretchedest of all wretched musical abortions, the tom-tom, had not been heard near the heart of Honolulu; but he has reinstated it and brought it into its ancient esteem and popularity. The old superstitions of this people were passing away far faster than is the case with the inhabitants of the unfrequented and sparsely populated country districts of America, France, and Wales, but Bishop Staley is putting a stop to progress in this direction.

We owe the strange and unpleasant scenes of last night to him—there are not ten white men in the kingdom who have ever seen their like before in public—and I am told that he is appalled at the work of his own hands—that he is ashamed—that he dreads to think of the comments it will provoke in Christian lands—in a word, that he finds, too late, that he has made a most melancholy blunder.