I believe that both freeholders and mechanics find employment on the plantations as occasional laborers.
A people so circumstanced, well taught in schools, freeholders to a large extent, living in a mild and salubrious climate, and with cheap and proper food, ought not, one would say, to decrease.

There are, of course, several reasons for their very rapid decrease, and all of them come from contact with the whites.

These brought among them diseases which have corrupted their blood, and made them infertile and of poor stamina.

But to this, which is the chief cause, must be added, I suspect, another less generally acknowledged.
The deleterious habit of wearing clothes has, I do not doubt, done much to kill off the Hawaiian people.

If you think for a moment, you will see that to adopt civilized habits was for them to make a prodigious change in their ways of life.