h these gentlemen have
produced by a misgovernment of fifteen months. Here is their peril,
which no purchase of newspapers and no subsequent editorial suppressions
can avert.

It may be asked if it be still time to do anything. It is, indeed,
already late; and these gentlemen, arriving in a golden moment, have
fatally squandered opportunity and perhaps fatally damaged white
prestige. Even the whites themselves they have not only embittered, but
corrupted. We were pained the other day when our municipal councillors
refused, by a majority, to make the production of invoices obligatory at
the Custom-house. Yet who shall blame them, when the Chief Justice, with
a smallness of rapacity at which all men wondered, refused to pay, and I
believe, still withholds the duties on his imports? He was above the
law, being the head of it; and this was how he preached by example. He
refused to pay his customs; the white councillors, following in his
wake, refuse to take measures to enforce them against others; and the
natives, following in his wake, refuse to pay their taxes. These taxes
it may, perhaps, be never possible to raise again directly. Taxes have
never been popular in Samoa; yet in the golden moment when this
Government began its course, a majority of the Samoans paid them. Every
province should have seen some part of that money expended in its
bounds; every nerve should have been strained to interest and gratify
the natives in the manner of its expenditure. It has been spent instead
on Mulinuu, to pay four white officials, two of whom came in the suite
of the Chief Justice, and to build a so-called Government House, in
which the President resides, and the very name of taxes is become
abhorrent. What can still be done, and what must be done immediately, is
to give us a new Chief Justice--a lawyer, a man of honour, a man who
will not commit himself to one side, whether in politics or in private
causes, and who shall not have the appearance of trying to coin money at
every joint of our affairs. So much the better if he be a man of talent,
but we do not ask so much. With an ordinary appreciation of law, an
ordinary discretion and ordinary generosity, he may still, in the course
of time, and with good fortune, restore confidence and repair the
breaches in the prestige of the whites. As for the President there is
much discussion. Some think the office is superfluous, still more the
salary to be excessive; some regard the present m