The Herald

THE HAWAIIAN IMBROGLIO.
A Scathing Review of Cleveland's Futile Policy.
A special to the Tribune from Washington says: The feeling with which the administration's confession of total failure in its Hawaiian restoration programme is shared by all classes of public men here can be most accurately described as either facetious or contemptuous. On the showing made in yesterday's report to congress, the president's management of the Hawaiian question must be admitted to have been, from any point of view, almost incredibly weak, fatuous and paradoxical.
Starting with an utterly false assumption of authority and responsibility, the executive has been led from one cumulative blunder to another, till his whole programme has had to be abandoned in humiliation and disaster.
By his furtive and uncandid course with congress and the country the president has justly exposed himself to the gravest suspicions of trickery and attempted abuse of his constitutional powers. By his absurd and unwarranted demand upon the legal government of Hawaii to surrender its authority in favor of the deposed queen he has subjected this country to the indignity of merited and unanswerable reproof from one of the feeblest nations of the civilized world.
Undertaking in behalf of a personally discredited and semi-barbarous ex-sovereign a Quixotic project of reparation and restoration, he has succeeded in bringing her fortunes to the lowest ebb they have yet reached, depriving her of all material advantages she might have reaped from acquiescence in the annexation movement, and casting her adrift with the sole resource of a civil suit for civil damages against the political champions and knights-errant of her suit, which is now to be laughed derisively out of court.
No more abortive or ludicrous ending to the hair-brained diplomatic programme can well be conceived than that confessed in the Hawaiian dispatches which went to the capitol yesterday.
The house of representatives, being tied hand and foot by the existing special order for tariff debate, cannot act upon any phase of the Hawaiian question for the next two weeks.
In the senate various solutions are pending and the investigation conducted by the committee on foreign relations is still in active progress. There being pressing necessity to block further threatened steps toward the restoration of the queen, immediate action of any sort is scarcely to be expected. The senate will, however, as the session lengthens, express its voice on the president's recent policy, and this expression, it is pretty certain, is to be one of emphatic disapproval and condemnation.