Mark Twain on the Annexation of Hawaii 25 Years Before It Happened

At Kuhio Avenue and Kanekapolei Street in Waikiki:
statue of Princess Kaiulani (1875-1899)

We have posted before about the annexation of Hawaii by the United States in 1898 (here, here, and here)

Here's Mark Twain's 1873 opinion against annexation. (It's really a polemic against American politics and culture.)

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government.

We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for "political influence." We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can do away with their occasional hangings for murder, and let them have Judge Pratt to teach them how to save imperiled Avery-assassins to society. We can give them some Barnards to keep their money corporations out of difficulties. We can give them juries composed entirely of the most simple and charming leatherheads. We can give them railway corporations who will buy their Legislatures like old clothes, and run over their best citizens and complain of the corpses for smearing their unpleasant juices on the track. In place of harmless and vaporing Harris, we can give them Tweed. We can let them have Connolly; we can loan them Sweeny; we can furnish them some Jay Goulds who will do away with their old-time notion that stealing is not respectable. We can confer Woodbull and Claflin on them. And George Francis Train. We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

Mark Twain rails against individuals, institutions, and behaviors who have 21st-century counterparts.