could be hired; and the
machinery was knocked down, and packed off to Sydney.
    It was the same way with the cultivation of the sugar-cane, a plant
indigenous to the island; peculiarly fitted to the soil and climate, and of so
excellent a quality that Bligh took slips of it to the West Indies. All the
plantations went on famously for a while; the natives swarming in the fields
like ants, and making a prodigious stir. What few plantations now remain are
owned and worked by whites, who would rather pay a drunken sailor eighteen or
twenty Spanish dollars a month, than hire a sober native for his fish and taro.
    It is well worthy remark here, that every evidence of civilisation among the
South Sea Islands directly pertains to foreigners; though the fact of such
evidence existing at all is usually urged as a proof of the elevated condition
of the natives. Thus, at Honolulu, the capital of the Sandwich Islands, there
are fine dwelling-houses, several hotels, and barber-shops, ay, even
billiard-rooms; but all these are owned and used, be it observed, by whites.
There are tailors, and blacksmiths, and carpenters also; but not one of them is
a native.
    The fact is, that the mechanical and agricultural employments of civilised
life require a kind of exertion altogether too steady and sustained to agree
with an indolent people like the Polynesians. Calculated for a state of nature,
in a climate providentially adapted to it, they are unfit for any other. Nay, as
a race, they cannot otherwise long exist.
    The following statement speaks for itself.
    About the year 1777, Captain Cook estimated the population of Tahiti at
about two hundred thousand.31 By a regular census, taken some four or five years
ago, it was found to be only nine thousand.32 This amazing decrease not only
shows the malignancy of the evils necessary to produce it, but from the fact the
inference unavoidably follows that all the wars, child murders, and other
depopulating causes, alleged to have existed in former times, were nothing in
comparison to them.
    These evils, of course, are solely of foreign origin. To say nothing of the
effects of drunkenness, the occasional inroads of the small-pox, and other
things which might be mentioned, it is sufficient to allude to a virulent
disease which now taints the blood of at least two-thirds of the common people
of the island; and, in some form or other, is transmitted from father to son.
    Their first horror and consternation at the earlier ravages of this