Evening bulletin. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu, Hawaii]) 1895-1912, 1909-03-25
LAND LAWS OF HAWAII AND THEIR
RELATION TO HOr1ESTEADS AND
THE LABOR QUESTION
BY w. A. KINNEY

for cane and the uplands for fruit and
small farming. In other words, you can
not as general rule raise as good fruit,
or raise 1t as cheaply or as well down on
the coast as you can on the higher levels,
and, vice versa, you cannot raise cane on
the higher levels as cheaply or as well
as you can ON the lower levels There is
natural adjustment here so that the
small farmer, sO-called, need not interfere
materially with the sugar industry but
will learn to lean upon IL and vice versa.
But this all means railroads. 1t means
the establishment of factories to handle
the produce of these higher levels and it
means quick and cheap transportation to
the coast. People may say-"the planta-
tions are not going to accept any such
proposition" The plantations, in my
judgment, will have very little to say
about It; they will either accept 1t or
eventually go out of business. We must
remember that the chief value Of Hawaii
is not its cane industry or anything else
that 1t can raise in an industrial way. Its
chief value is its naval and strategetic
value, not SO much to itself but to Eighty
Millions of American citizens on the main
land, and II you put all that we can raise
own Importance in the scales against the
naval and strategic value of Hawaii to the
mainland our side of 1t will not weigh
at all II the Federal Government and
Congress come to the conclusion that plan
tations necessarily, and as a permanent
thing, depreciate the naval and strategic
value of the islands, the plantations will
be wiped out. To put ii in other words,
ii, I,l ,,, So. 81, Ia,
is essential to the maintenance of the
plantations, and we prove that to the
satisfaction of the United States govern
ment, the result will not be that we shall
get cheap labor but quite to the contrary
the result will be that we shall be wiped
off the slate. But there is an increasing
number of business men in Hawaii who
believe that there Is nothing to prevent
us raising sugar and other tropical prod
ucts in way to promote rather than de-
preciate the value of Hawaii as a naval
and military base, and so the idea is
growing and developing in unexpected
quarters, right in the heart of plantation
circles and among od-time plantation men,
pointing to a local policy in accord with
the desires and plans Of the Federal Govern.
ment towards Hawaii, and, In my judy
ment, the net result of this will be not to
ruin Hawaii but to break the time-honored
precedent that sugar will prove the ruin
of any country that ties to it, and we shall
find that while profits may not be as great
as they have been, they will be surer, and
the gross value of the plantations and
other industries as great as they are to-
day.
To accomplish the desired result Ha-
wall must have plenty of time and should
borrow money, and on a large scale to aid
her She should subsidize, under close
government control, railways on all the
leading islands, and the steamship COM
panies as well. This does not mean an
anti-Asiatic program in the accepted sense
of the word. Hawaii is here at the cross
roads; there will always be large Asiatic
population here, and rightly so, but 1t must
be an Asiatic population without Asiatic-
izing the islands; the control, the DONNA