Whatever may be said of the influence of European and American profligacy in the Islands, they may be pointed to with perfect satisfaction for illustrations of the benefits of Christian civilization, and the people of this country are greatly indebted to the Rev. Henry T. Cheever, whose works on the subject we have had frequent occasion to praise, for the eminently judicious and interesting accounts he has given us of society, manners, and religion, and of industrial resources, and every kind of natural phenomena, throughout the "island world," especially in the Sandwich Islands, to which his last work[6] is altogether devoted. Of the important question of the political destiny of this group Mr. Cheever says: "Perhaps it is in the providential plan of the world's great Ruler, that the Sandwich Islands should yet be adopted into the Great American Confederacy. Won as they have been from the lowest barbarism by American missionaries,--having had expended upon them in the process nearly a million and a half of dollars from America, and the services of fifty families now possessing there valuable homesteads,--harboring a permanent American population, foremost in energy and influence, now little short of one thousand, besides a floating American population that touch and recruit annually to the number of fifteen thousand, in whaleships and merchantmen, and consuming yearly a million of dollars' worth of American merchandise; on all these grounds there would seem to be a propriety in their enjoying an American Protectorate, if not an admission under the flag of the American Republic.