 act, and an artful stroke of policy was
decided upon by the despicable councillors of the king to entrap the sympathies
and rouse the indignation of Christendom. His majesty was made to intimate to
the British captain that he could not, as the conscientious ruler of his beloved
people, comply with the arbitrary demands of his lordship, and in deprecation of
the horrors of war, tendered to his acceptance the provisional cession of the
islands, subject to the result of the negotiations then pending in London.
Paulet, a bluff and straightforward sailor, took the king at his word, and after
some preliminary arrangements, entered upon the administration of Hawaiian
affairs, in the same firm and benignant spirit which marked the discipline of
his frigate, and which had rendered him the idol of his ship's company. He soon
endeared himself to nearly all orders of the islanders; but the king and the
chiefs, whose feudal sway over the common people was laboriously sought to be
perpetuated by their missionary advisers, regarded all his proceedings with the
most vigilant animosity. Jealous of his growing popularity, and unable to
counteract it, they endeavoured to assail his reputation abroad by
ostentatiously protesting against his acts, and appealing in Oriental phrase to
the wide universe to witness and compassionate their unparalleled wrongs.
    Heedless of their idle clamours, Lord George Paulet addressed himself to the
task of reconciling the differences among the foreign residents, remedying their
grievances, promoting their mercantile interests, and ameliorating, as far as
lay in his power, the condition of the degraded natives. The iniquities he
brought to light and instantly suppressed are too numerous to be here recorded;
but one instance may be mentioned that will give some idea of the lamentable
misrule to which these poor islanders are subjected.
    It is well known that the laws at the Sandwich Islands are subject to the
most capricious alterations, which, by confounding all ideas of right and wrong
in the minds of the natives, produce the most pernicious effects. In no case is
this mischief more plainly discernible than in the continually shifting
regulations concerning licentiousness. At one time the most innocent freedoms
between the sexes are punished with fine and imprisonment; at another the
revocation of the statute is followed by the most open and undisguised
profligacy.
    It so happened that at the period of Paulet's arrival the Connecticut blue
laws had been for at least three weeks steadily enforced. In consequence of
this, the fort at Honolulu was filled with a great number of young girls, who
were confined there doing penance for their slips from virtue. Paulet, although
at first unwilling to interfere with regulations having reference solely to the
natives themselves
