Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1893 — Hawaiian Annxation. [ARTICLE]

Hawaiian Annxation.

In the year 1875 a treaty of reciprocity, so called, was made between the United States and his Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands, the principal feature of which was the admission of Hawaiian sugar free of duty to this country. As the islands could not produce more than one tenth of the sugar imported by us, the remission of the duty to them exclusively was equivalent to a bounty of two cents per pound on all they could produce. The sugar industry became very flourishing and passed into the hands of a few rich people in San Francisco. They managed to send us from 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 pounds per year. In 1889 our importations from Hawaii were 243,000,000 pounds. The bounty to the producers for that year was nearly $5,000,000. There was constant complaint among the people of the Pacific coast during all this time that they got their sugar no cheaper than before, but that on the contrary they were required to pay the market price of the East plus the freight charges for all that they used. This was not the only complaint. The Eastern refiners (before the days of the Sugar Trust) alleged, and no doubt, truly, that Mr. Spreckels was enabled to lay down sugars in the Mississippi Valley in unfair competition with them, since he got his raw sugar at 2 cents per pound less than they were required to pay. All this was quiet natural. Mr. Sprockets was not in the sugar business for the fun of the thing. If the Government had created a situation by which he could make a lot of money, he would have been a fool not to avail himself of it. It would be useless now to discuss the wisdom or unwisdom of the Treaty of 1875. Other considerations than those of sugar-planting entered into it. For better or for worse, the treaty ran along until the McKinley tariff was passed. The repeal of the duties on raw sugar put the Hawaiian Islands once more on the same footing as other foreign countries. Their bounty was cut off. To stop a regular income of four to five millions of dollars from a little group of islands, or rather from a small coterie in that group, is a serious matter. Something was sure to happen in consequence, and something has happened. There has been a “revolution.” The “Queen of the Sandwich Islands” has been overthrown. Tyranny is in the dust. The people (about 50,000 natives and 3,000 Americans and Europeans)' have asserted the sacred right of self-government. There are nearly as many Chinese coolies, called “contract laborers,” on the islands as there are of the native Hawaiian stock. Of course these have had nothing to do with the revolution, nor, for that matter, have the natives. The upheaval is in the American quarter altogether. It is a revolution on a strictly cash basis. When the McKinley tariff put raw sugar on the free-trade list it gave a i o inty of two cents per pound to the p.oducers of sugar in the United States. This was sufficient to revolutionize the Hawaiian Islands any day. The sugar-planters want that bounty. They have a delegation, or an embassy, or whatever it may be called, en routs to Washington City now to place the sovereignty of the kingdom at our disposal and the sugar bounty at their disposal. It is as plainly a private speculation as was the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo during Grant’s administration. Although the affair has come about suddenly, it is not likely to be disposed of suddenly. Certain belated patriots, whose prime has been passed in the nation’s callow period, are for asserting Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine and showing up our new navy, aDd making the American eagle scream. This is to be expected, of course, but the nation ought to be now beyond the perils of infancy, and really is so unless cast unexpectedly into a predicament from which there is no easy escape. Happily the annexation of foreign territory, as was shown in the cases of San Domingo and St. Thomas, requires time and gives abundant opportunity for reflection. It would be as presumptuous to pronounce hasty judgment agaiDSt annexation as for it, and we are far from saying that the proposal ought not to be entertained. We insist, however, that the project is prima facie a private speculation on the part of a few sugar-planters who have found their bounty suddenly cut off and who want to have it renewed. Uncle Sam has enough to do taking care of his own pensioners, without running over seas in search of new ones. Moreover, the chances are that we shall stop paying sugar bounties to our own people before any treaty of annexation can secure a two-thirds majority of the Senate.