Let Mataafa leave Malie for any other district in Samoa; it should be construed as an act of submission and the confiscation and proscription instantly recalled.

This was certainly well devised; the government escaped from their own false position, and by the same stroke lowered the prestige of their adversaries.

But unhappily the chief justice did not put all his eggs in one basket.

Concurrently with these negotiations he began again to move the captain of one of the war-ships to shell the rebel village; the captain, conceiving the extremity wholly unjustified, not only refused these instances, but more or less publicly complained of their being made; the matter came to the knowledge of the white resident who was at that time playing the part of intermediary with Malie; and he, in natural anger and disgust, withdrew from the negotiation.

These duplicities, always deplorable when discovered, are never more fatal than with men imperfectly civilised.