nd
Commission and the Supreme Court, it was good against objections, but it
appeared it was not yet good for registration, and must still be
resurveyed by a "Government surveyor." The option thus continues to
brood over the land of Mulinuu, the Government to squat there without
payment, and the German firm to stand helpless and dispossessed. What
can they do? Their adversary is their only judge. I hear it calculated
that the present state of matters may be yet spun out for months, at the
end of which period there must come at last a day of reckoning; and the
purchase-money will have to be found or the option to be waived and the
Government to flit elsewhere. As for the question of arrears of rent, it
will be in judicious hands, and his Honour may be trusted to deal with
it in a manner suitable to the previous history of the case.

But why (it will be asked) spin out by these excessive methods a thread
of such tenuity? Why go to such lengths for four months longer of
fallacious solvency? I expect not to be believed, but I think the
Government still hopes. A war-ship, under a hot-headed captain, might be
decoyed into hostilities; the taxes might begin to come in again; the
three Powers might become otherwise engaged and the little stage of
Samoa escape observation--indeed, I know not what they hope, but they
hope something. There lives on in their breasts a remainder coal of
ambition still unquenched. Or it is only so that I can explain a late
astonishing sally of his Honour's. In a long and elaborate judgment he
has pared the nails, and indeed removed the fingers, of his only rival,
the municipal magistrate. For eighteen months he has seen the lower
Court crowded with affairs, the while his own stood unfrequented like an
obsolete churchyard. He may have remarked with envy many hundred cases
passing through his rival's hands, cases of assault, cases of larceny,
ranging in the last four months from 2s. up to L1 12s.; or he may have
viewed with displeasure that despatch of business which was
characteristic of the magistrate, Mr. Cooper. An end, at least, has been
made of these abuses. Mr. Cooper is henceforth to draw his salary for
the _minimum_ of public service; and all larcenies and assaults, however
trivial, must go, according to the nationality of those concerned,
before the Consular or the Supreme Courts.

To this portentous judgment there are two sides--a practical and legal.
And first as to the practical. For every