The President is the King’s father. He is an erect, strongly built,
massive-featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of
age, or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth
coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust, or
blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is
a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior
under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century
ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this:
“This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand,
has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of
savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter
and carnage; has worshiped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen
hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to
wooden idols, at a time when no missionary’s foot had ever pressed this
soil, and he had never heard of the white man’s God; has believed his
enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his
childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with
his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the king—and now
look at him an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a
high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who
has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in
holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the
politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at
him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative
body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike
personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had
been born in it and had never been out of it in his lifetime. How the
experiences of this old man’s eventful life shame the cheap inventions
of romance!”