L600 of public money for the purchase of an
inconsiderable sheet, or at a time when eight provinces of discontented
natives threaten at any moment to sweep their ineffective Government
into the sea to have sought safety and strength in gagging the local
Press of Apia. If it be otherwise--if we cannot be relieved, if the
Powers are satisfied with the conduct of Mr. Cedercrantz and Baron
Senfft von Pilsach; if these were sent here with the understanding that
they should secretly purchase, perhaps privately edit, a little sheet of
two pages, issued from a crazy wooden building at the mission gate; if
it were, indeed, intended that, for this important end, they should
divert (as it seems they have done) public funds and affront all the
forms of law--we whites can only bow the head. We are here quite
helpless. If we would complain of Baron Pilsach, it can only be to Mr.
Cedercrantz; if we would complain of Mr. Cedercrantz, and the Powers
will not hear us, the circle is complete. A nightly guard surrounds and
protects their place of residence, while the house of the King is
cynically left without the pickets. Secure from interference, one utters
the voice of the law, the other moves the hands of authority; and now
they seem to have sequestered in the course of a single week the only
available funds and the only existing paper in the islands.

But there is one thing they forget. It is not the whites who menace the
duration of their Government, and it is only the whites who read the
newspaper. Mataafa sits hard by in his armed camp and sees. He sees the
weakness, he counts the scandals of their Government. He sees his rival
and "brother" sitting disconsidered at their doors, like Lazarus before
the house of Dives, and, if he is not very fond of his "brother," he is
very scrupulous of native dignities. He has seen his friends menaced
with midnight destruction in the Government gaol, and deported without
form of law. He is not himself a talker, and his thoughts are hid from
us; but what is said by his more hasty partisans we know. On March 29,
the day after the Chief Justice signed the secret judgment, three days
before it was made public, and while the purchase of the newspaper was
yet in treaty, a native orator stood up in an assembly. "Who asked the
Great Powers to make laws for us; to bring strangers here to rule us?"
he cried. "We want no white officials to bind us in the bondage of
taxation." Here is the changed spirit whic