en; "I
wish you would set that man ashore, to save me the trouble." The same
day de Coetlogon published a proclamation requesting captains to submit
to search for contraband of war.

On the 22nd the _Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser_ was suppressed by
order of Fritze. I have hitherto refrained from mentioning the single
paper of our islands, that I might deal with it once for all. It is of
course a tiny sheet; but I have often had occasion to wonder at the
ability of its articles, and almost always at the decency of its tone.
Officials may at times be a little roughly, and at times a little
captiously, criticised; private persons are habitually respected; and
there are many papers in England, and still more in the States, even of
leading organs in chief cities, that might envy, and would do well to
imitate, the courtesy and discretion of the _Samoa Times_. Yet the
editor, Cusack, is only an amateur in journalism, and a carpenter by
trade. His chief fault is one perhaps inevitable in so small a
place--that he seems a little in the leading of a clique; but his
interest in the public weal is genuine and generous. One man's meat is
another man's poison: Anglo-Saxons and Germans have been differently
brought up. To our galled experience the paper appears moderate; to
their untried sensations it seems violent. We think a public man fair
game; we think it a part of his duty, and I am told he finds it a part
of his reward, to be continually canvassed by the press. For the
Germans, on the other hand, an official wears a certain sacredness; when
he is called over the coals, they are shocked, and (if the official be
a German) feel that Germany itself has been insulted. The _Samoa Times_
had been long a mountain of offence. Brandeis had imported from the
colonies another printer of the name of Jones, to deprive Cusack of the
government printing. German sailors had come ashore one day, wild with
offended patriotism, to punish the editor with stripes, and the result
was delightfully amusing. The champions asked for the English printer.
They were shown the wrong man, and the blows intended for Cusack had
hailed on the shoulders of his rival Jones. On the 12th, Cusack had
reprinted an article from a San Francisco paper; the Germans had
complained; and de Coetlogon, in a moment of weakness, had fined the
editor twenty pounds. The judgment was afterwards reversed in Fiji; but
even at the time it had not satisfied the Germans. And so