over which they, and all friends of their work, might well rejoice. Not only had the language of the islands been reduced to writing, but two printing-presses were in operation at Honolulu, at which 387,000 copies in all, of twenty-two distinct books in the native tongue, had been printed, amounting to 10,287,800 pages. A large edition of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, had also been printed in the United States for the mission, swelling the whole number of pages in the Hawaiian language to 13,632,800. Most of these pages were portions of the Scriptures, or other strictly evangelical and most important matter. Nine hundred native schools, for teaching the people to read, were in operation, and about fortyfive thousand scholars, about twenty-one thousand readers, and more than three thousand writers, were reported. The Government had adopted the moral law of God as the basis of its future administration, and recognized the Christian religion as the religion of the nation. Most of the higher chiefs and rulers were members of the Church of Christ. Special laws against the grosser vices, and also against retailing ardent spirits, Sabbath-breaking, and gambling had been enacted and were enforced, and the Christian law of marriage was the law of the land. Decent houses for public worship had been erected by the chiefs and people in very many villages. Those at the several missionstations were large; one at Kailua, one hundred and eighty feet by seventy-eight, and one at Honolulu, one hundred and ninety-six by sixty-three. At Lahaina, the church was of stone, ninety-eight feet long and sixty-two broad, with galleries; "the most substantial and noble structure in Polynesia." It would seat three thousand persons after the native manner. The other churches were all thatched buildings. In these houses large congregations assembled from Sabbath to Sabbath, or when the missionary could attend, to listen to the preaching of the Gospel. Churches had been gathered at different stations, to which there had been admitted one hundred and eighty-five native members at the close of the year 1829. Letter addressed to Rev. Harvey comb: and future prospects of the missionary work at the Sandwich Islands. It is impossible to do justice to the subject in one brief letter; but allow me to say, that I believe the Gospel has effected a signal triumph on these shores. Savagism has fled before it, never to return. Idolatry, in its grossest forms, has fallen, never to rise again. Ignorance and superstition have fled apace before its rising light. Not that the people are remarkable for intelligence and wisdom; but they have made progress. They are not where they were thirty-five years ago. Most of them can read and write, and what is more, their minds have been imperceptibly expanded by the silent and constant influx of ideas from a world opening and moving around them. Like the man ascending the mountain, their horizon is extending at every step. The comforts and improvements of civilization are multiplying here. All men with eyes can see this, and all men of candor confess it. Social relations are better understood, and social obligations more faithfully discharged than in former days. Not that we are perfect, or near it; but we can report progress. The nation has experienced a great civil revolution, a political emancipation, and this without rebellion and without blood. Calmly, silently, but with the energy of light, the Gospel has undermined, overthrown, and melted the ancient despotism, and the temple of freedom is now rising on its ruins. Instead of the capricious, the selfish, the irresponsible, the crushing will of despots, we now have constitutional laws, the elective franchise recognized, prerogatives limited, rights defined, and life, limb, liberty, character, and the fruits of physical and mental toil protected. External morality is also more generally practiced here than in most nations, or, perhaps, any nation. No where on earth are life and property more secure. No where may the people sleep with open doors, by the wayside, or in the forests, with more safety than here. No where may the traveler with more impunity encamp where night overtakes him, lay his purse by his side, hang his watch on a tree, and commit himself to sleep. NaNew-clothing, and other things on the limb of tives often hang calabashes of food, fish, a tree by the wayside, and leave them thus for days or weeks, until they return from an excursion. Open crimes are of rare occurrence here. They increase, how HILO, HAWAII, April 17th, 1854. MY DEAR BROTHER: You ask my impressions concerning the present condition ever, as a certain class of white men are introduced. to call on the A. B. C. F. M., and on the Bible and Tract Societies, for special As to "pure and undefiled religion" grants to aid us in our work. But these among the people, we would speak with aids will be collateral. We are organizmodesty. God only knows the heart. ing independent institutions in the land. Our enemies say that in this, as in all Our churches are settling their pastors, good, we have signally failed. We are obtaining charters, etc. We have our Missure that the word of God has not been sionary, Bible, Tract, and other benevowithout effect-that it has not returned lent Societies, to draw out, collect, and void that those who have sown in tears scatter over many waters the beneficence have not reaped in sadness-that those of our churches. Already the relative who have fought with spiritual weapons amount of those charities does not suffer have not beat the air. It is our joy, and by comparison with the gifts of more faa part of our reward, to believe that many vored lands. In a word, we consider the of the poor sons and daughters of Hawaii Church of Christ as planted here, as havhave been prepared unto glory; that they ing taken root, and as bearing fruit. And now sing with the redeemed in heaven; as Christ said to his disciples, that their and that many now with us are following "fruit should remain," so we say of these in the steps of those who through faith children of the kingdom. We are sure and patience now inherit the promises. that the Redeemer has a church here, that This we believe, because God's word and it is founded on "The Rock," and that the fruits we see warrant such confidence." the gates of hell shall not prevail against How many, or what proportion of our it." But in saying this we do not affirm church members are the true seed of Abra- the perpetuity of the Hawaiian race. ham, we do not even conjecture. This we leave for the disclosures of the final day. That all of our converts are weak and childlike, we confess; while at the same time we feel that many of them are better than ourselves. We do not boast that in any one thing we have attained or are perfect, but we follow after. We are toiling up the hill, and we may say, with all our defects-and they are many-that no savage tribe ever went so fast and so far, in thirty-five years, as the Hawaiians. And the Gospel is the efficient cause. Not that we overlook or undervalue collateral agencies. These have been many. One class of facts has had a happy in fluence in helping to elevate and to bless this people, while another class has been decidedly antagonistical. For whatever good has been done, let God be praised. This may, and probably will, become extinct. The natives are few, and in physical, mental, and moral power, feeble. Amidst the march of men, the rush and the surges of a moving world, they may be overwhelmed and lost. Fleets of merchantmen, whalemen, and war-ships, are scattering thousands of our vigorous young men to all the winds of heaven. Foreigners are pouring in upon us from every point of the compass. Amalgamation is fast taking place-new forms of disease have swept off thousands to the tomb. The base passions of many vile and reckless seamen, like the consuming fires of hell, are destroying many in our sea-ports who should have become the mothers and matrons of a rising race. The English language is being learned by many and coveted by most-and all things combinAs to the future prospects of our isling, indicate the absorption or extinction ands, what shall we say? Here, of course, of the Hawiians as a distinct race, at no our knowledge is at fault. Our missionary operations are now in a transition state. As in other respects, so also in this, old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new. The islands are adopted into the great fraternity of Christian nations. Henceforth we are no longer to be known as foreign missionaries. Many of us are already receiving our full support from the churches over whom we are pastors. Others receive support in part, the lack being supplied from foreign sources. For years to come we may need distant day. Let it be so-still the islands will have a people, and God will have a Church here. A crisis may be at hand which will try men's souls. We shall need the prayers, the sympathies, the counsels, and the alms of the Church in older lands. The cause of education must be sustained here. We must have a college. We must have teachers and evangelical ministers-men of wise heads and holy hearts; men of self-denial, patience, zeal, discre tion, and broad philanthropy. Our work is not done. Probably our responsibilities were never so great as at the present hour. | of these Islands, surpassing any thing of All things grow around us, and we need the kind that has occurred in the history great faith, firmness, and wisdom, lest all of the world in so short a period. good be swept away by the currents of passion and of worldly and civil policy. Our joy and our triumph are, that "the Lord reigns," and his kingdom is safe. In Christian love, Your friend and brother, To these quotations a volume of testimony might be added, to show how true and how great a civil and religious renovation has been wrought in the condition By a report in 1861, printed by the American Board, it appears that the number of hopeful converts that have been received into the churches on the Islands exceeds in all forty-seven thousand, about twenty thousand of whom have died and a considerable number have disappeared, leaving more than twenty thousand still members of the churches. With these facts before him, the reader will be able to make the needful comparisons and judge for himself. PRINCES AND PRINCESSES OF WALES. built at Prince's Risborough! The moat near the little Buckinghamshire church there, marks one part of the site where dwelt together in love and mirthfulness the first of our married Princes and Princesses of Wales. The next case of marriage was, according to some, a love-match too, but according to others, and far more probably, a match of convenience, namely, that of the fugitive Prince of Wales, Edward, son of Henry the Sixth, with that wealthiest and most hapless of co-heiresses, Lady Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick, the King FIVE hundred years have elapsed since ] on at their palace at Berkhampstead! what England beheld the first marriage of a ridings, and joustings, and laughing, and Prince of Wales. Indeed, there have only love-making, about that smaller bower they been four such marriages in England, and one abroad. The preliminaries of marriage have often been made, but these were in such cases carried out after the Prince's accession to the throne. The first marriage to which we allude was that in 1361, of Edward the Black Prince with the "Fair Countess "-the buxom, warm-hearted, regal Joan of Kent. That was a rare love-match, albeit the bridegroom was over thirty years of age, and his brilliant English wife was the young widow of a former husband. But there was "heart" in the whole matter. England had known of no such hero as Ed-maker. This wedding was celebrated at ward, from his youth up, since the days of King Arthur, and all the realm of beauty, it is said, would have been hard put to it to produce altogether such a peerless lady as Joan-a little too sharp, perhaps, with her wit, which sometimes made good Queen Philippa look serious. But England loved the pair, and the pair loved one another. What joyous house they kept -not in Pall Pall! but in their princely mansion between Crooked Lane end and Fish Street Hill! What gay and rather costly doings-for Joan, it must be said, was a lady who loved such doings-went Amboise, in France, with great outward show of rejoicing, in which England here took no part. A few months latter, in 1471, the Prince of Wales came hither to win back a crown for his father and a home for his wife; but the young husband, not yet nineteen, fell at Tewkesbury; and the young Duke of Gloucester, then of the same age, subsequently took the widow unto himself, and proved not so indifferent a husband as romance and history would have us believe. The next bridegroom-prince was younger still than the last. Authur, son of Hen ry the Seventh, was but fifteen years of age when, in 1501, he married that vivacious Katherine of Arragon, who had been six months on her journey between the Alhambra and St. Paul's. All London was in wild hilarity at this Spanish match: the city, drinking, dancing, and dressed in its best, celebrated it by night and by day; the Court kept up the wedding festival for a whole brilliant, weary, and dissipated fortnight; while the Church seemed to have tumbled from propriety into the excess of its orthodox jollification. Had this newly-married Prince and Princess of Wales quietly gone down to young Arthur's moated manor at White Waltham, good might have come of it. They repaired, however, to Ludlow Castle, and there the solemn young bridegroom-what with study, and state solemnities and tiring ceremonials, and Katherine, who was imposing, exacting, supervivacious, able to dance down a dozen of such gallants as her husband, and always oppressive-fairly died of it all in five months, as might well have been expected. The Dowager Princess was betrothed to Arthur's brother Henry, in 1504, when the latter was Prince of Wales; but as they were not married till after Henry's accession to the throne, in 1509, we pass on to the next espousals of an heir apparent; and this did not occur till the Star of Brunswick was well above the horizon. There were love-passages enough and to spare between those periods. Prince Henry, that popular and ill-fated son of James the First, paid homage, after a fashion, to more than one English beauty in and about the court. In the midst of such pleasant pastime, which was very readily afforded him, and when he was about eighteen, negotiations were commenced in reference to a marriage between him and "Madame Clementine of France," a princess whose first-named dowry was doubled in order to tempt rather the Prince's father than the Prince, who in this matter exhibited that quality of readiness which indicates more of indifference or simple obedience, than a loving willingWhatever it may have been, naught came of it. He was not to occupy the now old house at Ham with a bride. Death stepped in, and as the royal body was borne to Westminster, the old shook their heads at the calamity, and the young mourned-some as if a brother had de ness. parted, others as if the very pink of heroic lovers had disappeared forever from the Court of Beauty. Again, when Charles, afterward the first of the name, was Prince of Wales, he made that romantic journey to Spain, to gain a glance of the lady who was named for his bride, and who was not so coyly cloistered up but that Charles found his way to her, in private. This designed match, however, was not completed; but the Prince of Wales, becoming King, found consolation in that Henrietta Maria of France, whose beauty had attracted him when on an embassy of love to another. The love-passages of the next Prince of Wales who came to manhood and paid homage to beauty are so "embroidered " by scandal, that we will not treat of them. For a disinherited Prince, Charles Stuart was, perhaps, the merriest as well as the poorest. Although not married while he bore the title of Prince, one serious attempt, at least, was made by his mother, in exile, to bring him within the register of Benedicks. What opportunities were rendered him to make way into the heart of the "Grande Mademoiselle," and how little he availed himself of them! What a subject for an artist is that incident of Henrietta Maria decking out this Grande Mademoiselle for a ball, while Charles held the light, and in this office of page was instructed to stand or move, now here, now there, to judge of the effect of a shoulder ribbon-of the play of a diamond necklace-of the fall of the hair-of the adjustment of the dress-of the pose of the whole figure-and of the flash of those lustrous eyes. For Charles they sparkled in vain. Even had he not yet grown audacious, he lacked the power of speaking French fluently, and the lively Princess was unacquainted with English. "Ah!" said the lady, after a tête-à-tête, during which they sat and looked at each other, "if he could but have spoken, Heaven only knows what might have happened!" Charles, however, did not speak, and the Grande Mademoiselle failed to become Princess of Wales. And then follows Brunswick; the first Prince of Wales of which house-he who was afterward George II.—was married to the clever Caroline Wilhelmina, at the age of twenty-two, and long before he was raised to that title. When created Prince of Wales, he had already a bevy of little heirs and heiresses about him; and during the time he enjoyed the title, it was the delight of himself and wife to be in a condition of the most irritating antagonism against the sire regnant. Frederick, the eldest son of George the Second, did not appear in England till after his father's accession, and his own creation as Prince of Wales. We believe there is truth in the old story that the Duchess of Marlborough had very nearly succeeded in inducing him to marry her granddaughter, Lady Diana Spenser who, indeed, would have made as peerless a princess as any more noble sister born in the purple. Fate and political considerations, however, would have it otherwise; and in 1736, when the Prince of Wales was in his twenty-ninth year, a treaty was concluded which gave him for a wife the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. Nearly two centuries and a half had elapsed since a Prince and Princess of Wales had come from the altar to be greeted by the people in England. The ceremony accordingly raised as much excitement in London as that of Arthur and Katherine-but with a difference. The Royal Chapel at St. James's is but a rabbit-hutch compared with what old St. Paul's was; but though the stage was limited, the spectacle was grand enough in its way. The stately and graceful dress of the Tudor time had indeed gone out of fashion, and a new attire was in vogue: that of the lady had a certain dignity, but a man in the full courtdress of the reign of George the Second was monkeyfied. The Prince of Wales, perhaps, bore it as easily as any man of his day, and the Princess, save that she was overwhelmed with excess of it, became her dress, even in the opinion of the sternest critics in that delicate matter. There was a banquet of course, but the most splendid part of the day's ceremony was the bidding "good night," at the end of it, to the wedded pair in their sleepingroom. There were assembled a very mob, from King and Queen downward to pages of the chamber, of the most gorgeously and extravagantly dressed lords and ladies, and aristocratic swains and nymphs that ever met to wish happiness to a bride and bridegroom. The former sat up on her throne-like couch, half- hidden in clouds of muslin and lace, while the Prince of Wales, in a dressing gown of stiff costly gold brocade, slipped from group to group, and fantastically answered the greetings which saluted him by the way. And therewith the day came to an end. After altogether another fashion were the next Prince and Princess of Wales made man and wife. The eldest son of George the Third, born in 1762, was as precocious as Prince Henry. At eighteen he was transmitting ridiculous love-letters to Perdita Robinson. At three-and-twenty he turned from the feet of Mrs. Crouch to pay homage at those of Mrs. Fitzherbert, a lady hard upon thirty years of age, and already the widow of two husbands. Of this lady, after a sort of wooing which savors of the extravaganza, he became the third husband-joined to her in holy matrimony, contrary to a profane act of Parliament, by a venturous Protestant clergyman, in the Catholic lady's backdrawing-room. How the rash couple looked at the time, and the very ring with which they were wedded, may now be seen in the Loan Exhibition at SouthKensington. But here was a pseudo Princess of Wales who was not wanted; and ten years later another was found for the Prince who was far less worthy, and perhaps more cruelly wronged. When Caroline of Brunswick and her future husband met at the altar, they had not seen one another before that day. The princely bridegroom was not sober, and the bride, despite of counsel from Mr. Harris and the ladies, was not particularly clean. They went "home" to wrangle-hatred dwelt where love should have abided, and the domestic drama which opened so gloomily, darkened as it proceeded, and closed with a touch of deepest tragedy. There is this remarkable in the marriage of the heir apparent of George the Third, that he is the only one who, marrying when Prince of Wales, subsequently ascended the throne. In the House of Brunswick may this happier course, thus commenced, be henceforth the rule. The coming match has happy auspices. The Princess Alexandra, daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, in addition to external and intellectual qualities, has earned golden opinions at home, as a good daughter," and the Prince of Wales, especially in circumstances of late of some difficulty, has shown himself a cheerfully dutiful son. His training, too, and his experiences have been such as none of his royal pre |