t is willing to be taught the
condition of this country. From what I have been able to collect,
Samoans are indignant because the thing was decided between the King and
President without consultation with the native Parliament. The thing
itself, it does not enter in their thoughts to call in question; they
receive gratefully a fresh lesson in civilised methods and civilised
justice; a day may come when they shall put that lesson in practice for
themselves; and if they are then decried for their barbarity--as they
will surely be--and punished for it, as is highly probable, I will ask
candid people what they are to think? "How?" they will say. "Your own
white people intended to do this, and you said nothing. We do it, and
you call us treacherous savages!"

This is to suppose the story false. Suppose it true, however; still
more, suppose the plan had been carried out. Suppose these chiefs to
have surrendered to the white man's justice, administered or not by a
brown Judge; suppose them tried, condemned, confined in that snare of a
gaol, and some fine night their mangled limbs cast in the faces of their
countrymen: I leave others to predict the consequences of such an
object-lesson in the arts of peace and the administration of the law.
The Samoans are a mild race, but their patience is in some points
limited. Under Captain Brandeis a single skirmish and the death of a few
youths sufficed to kindle an enduring war and bring on the ruin of the
Government. The residents have no desire for war, and they deprecate
altogether a war embittered from the beginning by atrocities. Nor can
they think the stakes at all equal between themselves and Baron Senfft.
He has nothing to lose but a situation; he is here in what he stands in;
he can swarm to-morrow on board a war-ship and be off. But the residents
have some of them sunk capital on these shores; some of them are
involved in extended affairs; they are tied to the stake, and they
protest against being plunged into war by the violence, and having that
war rendered more implacable by the preliminary cruelties, of a white
official.

I leave entirely upon one side all questions of morality; but there is
still one point of expediency on which I must touch. The old native
Government (which was at least cheap) failed to enforce the law, and
fell, in consequence, into the manifold troubles which have made the
name of Samoa famous. The enforcement of the law--that was what was
required, t