Early on the 21st, Mr. Mansfield Gallien, a passing traveller, was seized in his berth on board the _Richmond_, and carried, half-dressed, on board a German war-ship. His offence was, in the circumstances and after the proclamation, substantial. He had gone the day before, in the spirit of a tourist to Mataafa's camp, had spoken with the king, and had even recommended him an appeal to Sir George Grey. Fritze, I gather, had been long uneasy; this arrest on board a British ship fitted the measure. Doubtless, as he had written long before, the consul alone was responsible "on the legal side"; but the captain began to ask himself, "What next?"--telegraphed direct home for instructions, "Is arrest of foreigners on foreign vessels legal?"--and was ready, at a word from Captain Hand, to discharge his dangerous prisoner. The word in question (so the story goes) was not without a kind of wit. "I wish you would set that man ashore," Hand is reported to have said, indicating Gallien; "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