The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-08-19
TOURISTS VS.. SETTLERS.

: vestors that wants to come here ano
9 stay. The tourist who acts as II ne
does not care to know Hawaii at all, is
importuned at the cost of thousand
dollars month TO change his mind
while the farmer, who has Hawaii on
the brain and is writing here all the
time for information, cannot get track
of any land to buy.
And yet every other newly-opened
part of the United States makes the
acquisition OF settlers its first aim.
Southern California sends out ten pam
phIets on orange and raisin culture to
one on scenery. Colorado issues vol
umes about mining and farming where
it prints leaflets about hotels and ex-
cursion points The Florida boom of
twenty years ago was based on the
productiveness of the SOIL If one ex-
| amines the promotion literature of Cali
fornia he will find that SETTLEMENT
! is its key note. Mining, not climate,
brought people to California in the first
place; Charles Nordhof's book on the
| openings for agriculture and horticul-
ture in the Golden State created the
+ second boom; the third and greatest
was based entirely on land values.
Only in Hawaii are the main induce
ments for the building up of a new
country ignored and energies concen-
trated on attracting guests who stay
but a few days or weeks when they
come at all and who. so far. have cost
us more than they left behind.
What makes the thing the more
amazing is that we boldly challenge, in !
the tourist campaign, host of great I
difficulties and subside abjectly, when I
it comes to getting settlers, to minor /
and immaterial ones. We know, for I
instance, that California gets most of |
the tourists that come to the coast and
wants to keep them; that her entice-
ments are innumerable; that her hotel
keepers warn tourists away from here +
by telling them that we have fearsome
diseases and Martinique volcanoes;
they dwell upon the long ocean trip
and the high price of passage; they
talk vagutly of '.quarantines'' and in
nine cases out of ten they hold their
men. Obstacles like these are we'll
nigh insurmountable yet we go at them
with the cheerful hardwood of Don !
Quixote when he couched his spear at
the mill on the plain. But the minute
to the cheap rejoinder that the public
lands have yet no roads and cannot be
settled until these highways are built.
If that plea had sufficed on the main
land, America would be a wilderness
today. But thank God it did not suf-
fee. The lands were opened at low
price and the pioneers rushed in to pos
sess them telling giant trees as they
went and building roads across the
burnt vestiges of the stumps. Here, it
appears, our remarkable government !
would wait until macadamized roads :
have been built and then, perhaps, let
a fey settlers in. Even that recourse
has not been taken yet There are no 1
new roads starting and no visible pur- ]
pose to build any.
Is it not astonishing? Here we have 9
tens of thousands of acres of suscepti- ,
bic land without house on them; vast /
ranch spaces given over to weeds and
fantana; enormous leased estates where
fifteen acres are devoted to one COW; l
ocrria III
Massachusetts, and only 100000 people in I
it, nearly half of them Asiatic and other f
Here is a soil lying fallow, '
capable of raising specialized export
crops and giving a farmer a good liv- :
ing besides-and we let it lie. Main /
land farmers importune the Govern 6
ment for land and get non-committaI :
pamphlet in reply: they ask for bread
and we give them stone. Worse than
that, they ask to come and raise their
own bread and ours and we tell them
to keep off-that we prefer stones. Then
we send an ambassador to the coast to
if we can, by the spending
of much money, secure a fortnight's
visit, at reduced rates of entertainment,
for seventy-five Knights Templar. AS
the street boy remarked: Say. Amt
We beauts %
We put the question: Is it not time
to begin building up white population
in Hawaii as other parts of the A1neri-
can West have done and take our
chances with that rather than with the
few tourists whom California will ever
consent to let go of?
A NAVAL MYSTERY.