What I saw on the west coast of South and North America, and at the Hawaiian Islands.: By H. Willis Baxley, M.D.

SOCIETY.-RELIGIOUS PREFERENC~OF THE KING.
occupancy of the chair of a frontier partisan newspaper, could
scarcely be expected to fit him for ministerial duties. If, however, such are to be regarded by thie appointing power as proofs
of fitness for positions of delicate and responsible trust, the
United States must expect an estimate to be put upon them by
foreigners, corresponding to the characters of those they accredit
abroad.
The better educated few of the Hawaiians, especially the
women, mingle on terms of equality with foreigners in their
social circle at Honolulu; nor is that circle disparaged by the
association, for in the lighter graces of fashionable life, music,
the dance, sprightly conversation, and pleasing deportment, it
would have been difficult at the private entertainments and public assemblies I attended, to have selected among their Caucasian sisters more attractive examples of these than were presented
by some of thefairer specimens of Hawaiian belles.
Churches are sufficiently numerous, and worshippers profess
as diversified belief, and maintain their opinions with an intensity of bigotry and bad logic, conformable with the example of
the teachers who train them. But of religion in these islands
something may be said when other opportunities shall have been
afforded to obtain full and satisfactory information. The royal
family have a preference for the profession of faith and the ritualism of the Church of England; and at their instance a
Bishop of that Church, under the auspices of Queen Victoria,
was sent to the Hawaiian Islands in 1862 formally to establish
and "further the good work of the English mission." This has
been the cause of a most extraordinary manifestation of jealousy
and ill temper on the part of the Rev. Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who in a
recent book (1864) on the Hawaiian Islands, designates it "a
breach of that courtesy which is due from one Christian body
to another," and charges further that "in the hour of their victory a body of professed allies comes to us from the land of our
fathers, with the evident intent, if it be possible, of taking possession of the field." Really such contracted feelings are unworthy of the professed objects of the enterprise in which the
Rev. Secretary boasts of having been long engaged.
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