The Decline of the Dance In Hawaii

1895

In looking over the polished floors of the Kamehameha School For Girls one almost wishes that its founders had directed that dancing should be taught and practiced upon them by the student girls. It certainly was a narrow and superficial view of the native life which held these childlike people, who did not have story books and couldn't go wild over the old catechism, should have been deprived of one of their chief sources of amusement.

Though the native dances were objectionable in many ways, they could have been greatly modified and made respectable. The early teachers not only deprived themselves of amusements from the dictates of conscience, but they failed to provide the natives with any. It was the result of the Puritan inheritance which quickly gives way when the Puritan stock gets out into the world. — Honolulu Commercial Advertiser.