no honest man in the
islands but is well aware of it; none but knows that, if we have enjoyed
during the past eleven months the conveniences of peace, it is due to the
forbearance of "our rebel." Nor does this part of his conduct stand
alone. He calls his party at Malie the government,--"our
government,"--but he pays his taxes to the government at Mulinuu. He
takes ground like a king; he has steadily and blandly refused to obey all
orders as to his own movements or behaviour; but upon requisition he
sends offenders to be tried under the chief justice.

We have here a problem of conduct, and what seems an image of
inconsistency, very hard at the first sight to be solved by any European.
Plainly Mataafa does not act at random. Plainly, in the depths of his
Samoan mind, he regards his attitude as regular and constitutional. It
may be unexpected, it may be inauspicious, it may be undesirable; but he
thinks it--and perhaps it is--in full accordance with those "laws and
customs of Samoa" ignorantly invoked by the draughtsmen of the Berlin
Act. The point is worth an effort of comprehension; a man's life may yet
depend upon it. Let us conceive, in the first place, that there are five
separate kingships in Samoa, though not always five different kings; and
that though one man, by holding the five royal names, might become king
in _all parts_ of Samoa, there is perhaps no such matter as a kingship of
all Samoa. He who holds one royal name would be, upon this view, as much
a sovereign person as he who should chance to hold the other four; he
would have less territory and fewer subjects, but the like independence
and an equal royalty. Now Mataafa, even if all debatable points were
decided against him, is still Tuiatua, and as such, on this hypothesis, a
sovereign prince. In the second place, the draughtsmen of the Act,
waxing exceeding bold, employed the word "election," and implicitly
justified all precedented steps towards the kingship according with the
"customs of Samoa." I am not asking what was intended by the gentlemen
who sat and debated very benignly and, on the whole, wisely in Berlin; I
am asking what will be understood by a Samoan studying their literary
work, the Berlin Act; I am asking what is the result of taking a word out
of one state of society, and applying it to another, of which the writers
know less than nothing, and no European knows much. Several interpreters
and several days were employed last Se