done, and the curtain rose on the set scene of the coronation, Mataafa was absent, and Tamasese stood in his place.  Malietoa was to be deposed for a piece of solemn and offensive trickery, and the man selected to replace him was his sole partner and accomplice in the act.  For so strange a choice, good ground must have existed; but it remains conjectural:  some supposing Mataafa scratched as too independent; others that Tamasese had indeed betrayed Laupepa, and his new advancement was the price of his treachery.

So these two chiefs began to change places like the scales of a balance, one down, the other up.  Tamasese raised his flag (Jan. 28th, 1886) in Leulumoenga, chief place of his own province of Aana, usurped the style of king, and began to collect and arm a force.  Weber, by the admission of Stuebel, was in the market supplying him with weapons; so were the Americans; so, but for our salutary British law, would have been the British; for wherever there is a sound of battle, there will the traders be gathered together selling arms.  A little longer, and we find Tamasese visited and addressed as king and majesty by a German commodore.  Meanwhile, for the unhappy Malietoa, the road led downward.  He was refused a bodyguard.  He was turned out of Mulinuu, the seat of his royalty, on a land claim of Weber’s, fled across the Mulivai, and “had the coolness” (German expression) to hoist his flag in Apia.  He was asked “in the most polite manner,” says the same account—­“in the most delicate manner in the world,” a reader of Marryat might be tempted to amend the phrase,—­to strike his flag in his own capital; and on his “refusal to accede to this request,” Dr. Stuebel appeared himself with ten men and an officer from the cruiser Albatross; a sailor climbed into the tree and brought down the flag of Samoa, which was carefully folded, and sent, “in the most polite manner,” to its owner.  The consuls of England and the States were there (the excellent gentlemen!) to protest.  Last, and yet more explicit, the German commodore who visited the be-titled Tamasese, addressed the king—­we may surely say the late king—­as “the High Chief Malietoa.”

Had he no party, then?  At that time, it is probable, he might have called some five-sevenths of Samoa to his standard.  And yet he sat there, helpless monarch, like a fowl trussed for roasting.  The blame lies with himself, because he was a helpless creature; it lies also with England and the States.  Their agents on the spot preached peace (where there was no peace, and no pretence of it) with eloquence and iteration.  Secretary Bayard seems to have felt a call to join personally in the solemn farce, and was at the expense of a telegram in which he assured the sinking monarch it was “for the higher interests of Samoa” he should do nothing.  There was no man better at doing that; the advice came straight home, and was devoutly followed.  And to be just to the great Powers, something was done in Europe;