Chapter 3 - Page 2

together. A king
has no proper business with reforming. His best policy is to keep things
as they are; and if he can't do that, he ought to try to make them worse
than they are. This is not guesswork; I have thought over this matter a
good deal, so that if I should ever have a chance to become a king I
would know how to conduct the business in the best way.

When Liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed of an
equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a wiser king would have
known how to husband, and judiciously employ, and make profitable. The
entire country was under the one scepter, and his was that scepter.
There was an Established Church, and he was the head of it. There was a
Standing Army, and he was the head of that; an Army of 114 privates under
command of 27 Generals and a Field Marshal. There was a proud and
ancient Hereditary Nobility. There was still one other asset. This was
the tabu--an agent endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an
agent not found among the properties of any European monarch, a tool of
inestimable value in the business. Liholiho was headmaster of the tabu.
The tabu was the most ingenious and effective of all the inventions that
has ever been devised for keeping a people's privileges satisfactorily
restricted.

It required the sexes to live in separate houses. It did not allow
people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place. It did
not allow a man's woman-folk to enter his house. It did not allow the
sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on
them. Then the women could eat what was left--if anything was left--and
wait on themselves. I mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort
was left, the women could have it. But not the good things, the fine
things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the
choicer varieties of fish, and so on. By the tabu, all these were sacred
to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering
what they might taste like; and they died without finding out.

These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear. It was easy to
remember them; and useful. For the penalty for infringing any rule in
the whole list was death. Those women easily learned to put up with
shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so
expensive.

It was death for any one to walk upon tabu'd ground; or defile a tabu'd
thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon
the king's shadow. The nobles and the King and the priests were always
suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the
people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near.
The struggle for life was