The next day I asked certain citizens who should have known how this thing came to be in such a godly country, and the various answers about came to this: “The Government and the Churches have done their best to shut those places up, but somehow they haven’t succeeded. And then, you see, they pay enormous rents.” “But who owns the property?” I asked one old and highly respected resident. “Well, if _I_ did I shouldn’t tell you,” he replied. “Come and have a drink!” It was a hot day and I thought I might as well leave it at that. Later on this moral plague-spot became a physical plague-spot as well. The Black Death spread its sombre wings over it, and the purging fires have swept it in smoke and flying flame from the face of the insulted earth up to the yet more insulted heavens. Wherefore the Paradise of the Pacific ought to be a good deal cleaner now than it was when I was there. [Illustration: Sanford B. Dole. First Governor of the Territory of Hawaii.] That afternoon I called at Government House and sent my card in to Mr. Sanford B. Dole, President of the Hawaiian Republic. He is the man who came to the front when the reactionary tactics of King Kalakaua and his sister and successor, Liliuokalani, raised the somewhat important question as to whether the Hawaiian Islands were going to fall into line with civilisation or fall back into a state of semi-barbarism—for that is about what it came to. President Dole is a “missionary”; that is to say, he belongs to the clerical aristocracy of Honolulu. He is not a clergyman himself, and he has the credit of belonging to one of the very few missionary families in the islands which have not become wealthy. The last President that I had interviewed was Paul Krüger, late of Kerk Street, Pretoria. There was a very striking difference between the two men. The Boer was bulky, slow of speech and motion, with manners unspeakable; also little keen eyes which looked at you piercingly for a moment, and then dodged away—cunning incarnate in the flesh and a good deal both of the cunning and the flesh. Still, at the time, I confess that I thought him a man, and, in his way, a great one—not a common boodler who would squeeze his country for all it was worth, and then, at the first note of danger, bolt with all the plunder he could lay his hands on. When I went into President Dole’s Council Chamber—which had once been the Queen’s boudoir, and in Kalakaua’s time before her, the scene of many a half-barbaric orgie—I was greeted by a tall, rather slight, but well set-up man dressed in spotless white. He had the air of being at once virile and venerable, for his hair and his long, almost patriarchal beard were both grey. But the figure was alert. He walked up and down the room the whole time we were talking. The grey-blue eyes were quick and keen and steady. I may also add, _en parenthèse_, that he was one of the handsomest men I have ever spoken to.