B WILLARD FRENCH Colonel French has just returned from a journey to the Far East, during which he revisited Hawaii. His paper should stir Americans to insist that their Representatives and Senators support the bill to which he refers. This article is the sixth in the present series. The Philippines, Cuba, Panama and Porto Rico have already been described by Hamilton Wright, C. H. Forbes-Lindsay and John F. Wallace. EAUTIFUL Hawaii! What pages of picturesque prose-poetry the gem of the Western Ocean has inspired! What love at first sight and lasting love thrills heart of the suitor, whether for a day or a year or a lifetime he kneels in the Para and eternal prosperity of our twenty-five thousand miles of Pacific Coast. In 1841 President Tyler gave notice to the world that the American Government was looking after Hawaii, recognizing thereby that in these islands lay the defense of the nation from invasion Pacificward. In the sixty-odd years which have followed, the United States has never for a moment failed to realize the necessity of keeping other nations from controlling the islands which practically are the key to the entire Pacific for all manner of transportation, except as it creeps up and down the coast of China. And yet, in all these years, not an adequate fortification of any kind has been placed there, nor has a single effective step been taken to make available the one perfect, landlocked harbor within thousands of miles in any direction - Pearl Harbor, a few miles down the coast from Honolulu. We have suffered spasmodic twinges of foreboding over what we ought to have done long ago. We have taken down the key and fondled it, then hung it up again. In 1854, under all kinds of threats from other nations, King Kamehameha sought to protect himself from obliteration by appealing to the United States to annex the Hawaiian Islands; but that effort failed. At the close of the Civil War Secretary Seward took the matter up and gave it a vigorous push. He sent a secret agent to the islands to investigate thoroughly and arrange a purchase price. For a time American statesmen who were behind the movement felt that the transaction was assured. Seward had a dream of the development of the Pacific which, if at that time he could have followed to fulfillment, with a free hand, would long since have resulted in a gigantic commercial supremacy and military dominance of the Pacific for the benefit of America. But that was many years ago! Seward found himself so mercilessly criticized and condemned for and condemned for the purchase of Alaska that his courage failed him. He let the effort die in swaddling clothes. To-day Japan is well in the lead, commercially at least, and capable of holding her own. Every other maritime nation on earth is participating - every nation but America. America owns the Philip THE JUDICIARY BUILDING, HONOLULU The second floor is occupied by the Territorial Supreme Court and the First Circuit Court; the left half of the first floor by the United States District Court Massive business blocks, electric cars, and new highways bordered with beautiful residences, mark the rapid development of the city pines and Guam, on one side, and 25,000 miles of coast on the other side, and the commerce of her Hawaiian territory alone was $47,741,300 last year; but America has less than a dozen ships to fly her flag in the merchant service of the Pacific Ocean. We have killed our merchant marine by oppressive shipping laws and refused to compensate by protective aid. So that this much of Seward's dream has gone beyond our grasp, but Hawaii remains the key to the Pacific and the only safeguard of our western coast. Before the Spanish War there was another effort toward possession of that key. We were very generally roused to the dire necessity of possessing it. We were told on every hand of the vital importance, the strategic importance of Pearl Harbor as the real - and the only -way of protecting our Pacific coast. There was not, then, the added necessity of a mid-ocean fortress, refuge, base and coaling station, on account of the Philippines, but the imperative duty which the country owed to its Pacific coast, in a * dieremation brorens Con71* order preinitary westward the part of woven of Pean Har bor for the construction there of a navai maling station. A small appropriation waz made to begin the business and we had fair hopes that something would be dony that would result in a safe, sure harter properly fortified and protected. Trom which stronghold it would be a sim ple matter to prevent any feet under heaven from approaching our coast. for without another harbor in thousands of miles, for coal and supplies, nothing could reach the comet prepared to fight, much Jess to get away again. Nothing would attempt it, leaving an enemy's stronghold in mid oman behind it. Then the war with Spain revived annexation, rendering it imperative, and in the possession of the whole, Pearl Harbor was again utterly forgotten. Even the original appropriation was not wholly expended, and for ten years, from that day to this, we have hardly lifted a finger toward perfecting Pearl Harbor. An Englishman standing seamer beside me Pearl Harbor, a It's damned o HONOLULU IN THE NUUANU VALLEY of flowers and foliage is everywhere outside the business district a war with Japan, for instance, in which case no one could deny that with a single battle-ship the brown nation could take AND AS SHE IS possession of the islands as they are, today, without the necessity of firing a single shot; and the sure demands which must shortly be made upon Hawaii in the tremendous increase in shipping which will follow the opening of the Panama Canal, when almost everything passing through the canal, except for South America and New Zealand, must of necessity call there for supplies. The little open harbor, the ocean roadstead, in front of Honolulu, would be hopelessly inadequate for the transaction of business. Patriotic dwellers in Honolulu have lost no opportunity to urge the dire necessity of something, if only for the development of Hawaii's self, and at last the presence of the great fleet off San Francisco has apparently added a final straw, in demanding attention. It has brought forcibly to the front the fact that the key to the Pacific still hangs upon its dusty peg; that Japan and Manila are the nearest harbors where the fleet could find anchorage, if it followed the course of empire from San Francisco. While these lines are being written a little bill is waiting the attention of Congress, asking for $300,000 to begin again the development of Pearl Harbor. Compare the amount |