As to the King, Kamehameha III, he appears to be a prince of considerable parts. He has given up tattooing his face, and although he has not yet converted all the courtiers to his views, he already experiences the well-earned satisfaction of seeing nothing on their faces and cheeks but chaste designs, traced in thin outline. The bulk of the nation, the landed nobility and the townspeople, cling, in this and other respects, to their old ideas. The European population of the Sandwich Islands is, however, swollen every day by new arrivals. There are many reasons for this. The short distance separating the Hawaiian Kingdom from California makes it a very interesting focus for the clear-sighted energy of the white race. Deserters from the whaling vessels or mutinous sailors are not the only colonists; merchants, speculators, adventurers of all kinds, flock to the islands, build houses, and settle down. The native race is gradually tending to mix with the invaders and disappear. I am not sure that the present representative and independent system of administration will not soon give place to an ordinary government of delegates, controlled by some great power. But of this I am certain, that the institutions that are brought in will end by establishing themselves firmly, and the first day of their triumph will necessarily be the last for the natives. At San Domingo the independence is complete. There are no missionaries to exert a veiled and absolute power, no foreign ministry to carry out European ideas; everything is left to the inspiration of the people itself. Its Spanish part consists of mulattoes, of whom I need say nothing. They seem to imitate, well or badly, all that is most easily grasped in our civilization. They tend, like all hybrids, to identify themselves with the more creditable of the races to which they belong. Thus they are capable, to a certain extent, of reproducing our customs. It is not among them that we must study the question in its essence. Let us cross the mountains that separate the Republic of San Domingo from the State of Hayti. We find a society of which the institutions are not only parallel to our own, but are derived from the latest pronouncements of our political wisdom. All that the most enlightened liberalism has proclaimed for the last sixty years in the deliberative assemblies of Europe, all that has been written by the most enthusiastic champions of man’s dignity and independence, all the declarations of rights and principles—these have all found their echo on the banks of the Artibonite. Nothing African has remained in the statute law. All memories of the land of Ham have been officially expunged from men’s minds. The State language has never shown a trace of African influence. The institutions, as I said before, are completely European. Let us consider how they harmonize with the manners of the people.