and the Sandwich Islands members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The congregation here is ordinarily five or six hundred, well dressed and decorous in behavior, seated generally on rude settees. The most interesting and hopeful part of the congregation are, as always, the children and youth, of whom the proportion here is probably greater than in any other field in these Islands. There are twelve hundred in the day-schools, and all of them are required to be present at the Sabbath-schools. At the Station are three different classes on the Sabbath, in the Ai o ka la, or Daily Food: children in the morning, adults at noon, and a class of unmarried young persons just before the sermon in the afternoon. The singing of the native choir is very respectable, without any help from the pastor, being trained by a graduate from Lahainaluna. The resident missionaries are called invalids, but they perform an amount of labor (at least the pastor) in preaching, pastoral care, and supervision of schools, that would be deemed quite enough for robust well men at home. Miss Brown has a school of eight or ten girls, whom she is teaching to card and spin cotton, and to weave and knit.* It is hoped they will learn by it a habit of * The common schools of Molokai have been generally organized after an industrial plan, for purposes of utility, and to instil the principles and habits of industry in Hawaiian youth; and the following is the substance of their report for 1850, which may exemplify what is doing RELATIVE INTELLIGENCE OF HAWAIIAN FEMALES. 171 industry, and a fondness for work, so as not to be willing hereafter to loll and to lounge, like most Hawaiian women, who, in civilization, intelligence, and all the proprieties of social life, are far below the men. When you see a company of young Hawaiian girls, from ten to fourteen, with bright, sparkling eyes, faces by practical working missionaries, in the line of educational and social improvement at the Heart of the Pacific: The schools are divided into male and female departments. The female department meets in the morning for regular school at half past eight, and continue at their books till half past eleven. At twelve the male department meets for the same purpose, and continue at their studies till three P. M. During the afternoon, the girls, under lunas chosen by themselves, engage in light suitable work for those who wish to employ them, and at prices agreed upon between the lunas and the employer. This money is kept by said luna till the end of the quarter, and then equally divided among the members composing the division. The males, on the contrary, begin work at daylight and work till about eleven, when the first bell rings for them to prepare for school. This plan has now been in operation several years, and, it is thought, with excellent results. On Molokai are 929 scholars in all; from these deduct for Catholic scholars, who do not generally have a working department, 76, leaves the number 853. These 853 scholars have, during the year 1850, received for their labor the nice sum, in cash, of $1556.564. Of this sum, the station school at Kaluaaha has earned $490.25. This is exclusive of sums earned by the scholars in their own time after three P. M. The number of scholars at Kalua'aha is 206, making the average earning of each child in the school $2.38; but if we take from that number the 60 or 70 scholars who are too small to work, we shall find that each working scholar has really earned over $3.25. The 76 Roman Catholic scholars have only reported $9.50 as the proceeds of their labors. full of sportiveness and glee, and their forms expanding like rose-buds, you wish they might always look so, and you think what a pity it is they should ever become the gross, sensual creatures that so many of them turn into in a few years. There is needed at every station, to operate upon Hawaiian females, a school like Mrs. Coan's at Hilo, or the Female Seminary at Wailuku: to teach them notions of propriety, to form habits of industry, and to make them suitable as wives and mothers. Multiply such schools, and they would do incomparably more than all the silly orders of the Cabinet and King for the ladies to appear only in tight dresses and corsets. On the score of modesty alone, to say nothing of its economy and comfort, the present dress of Hawaiian females, something like a lady's loose morning-gown, is both decorous and comely. The hasty rage which some foreigners seem to have at once to Europeanize and make court-like the Hawaiian government and dress, is, we cannot help saying, alike unwise and ridiculous. • If it does not swamp the nation, annihilate whatever is distinctively Hawaiian, and give paramount ruinous ascendency to foreign interests and influence, it will be strange. It is said the Queen was once disciplined in the church for drinking awa. But she alleged, on trial, that she was drinking it to reduce her portly person to the fit of the tight dress prescribed by the tyranny of court-fashion. THE MODERN HABILIMENTS OF WOMAN. 173 Now we say, give straitjackets to maniacs, and leave corsets and small-clothes to the rouged harlots of the Opera; but for the women of Hawaii, both modesty and taste would be less offended to have them resume something like the old heathen costume of the pau and kihei, than to be squeezed into the garb of Paris belles. The highest authority in America for taste and purity in all that appertains to woman-to woman as she is and woman as she should be-has said of the fashionable modern habiliments of the sex, Your dress has made the form by nature given, And is it human? Can it breathe and feel? The bosom, beautiful of mould, alas! Where, now, thy pillow, youth? (But let it pass.) Is tortured like the body, cramped, confined: To bend to it each passion, thought, desire; Live uncondemned, yet prostrate all within. |