brilliant or dignified monarch, writing in the forest, in heaviness of
spirit and under pressure for time, should have left behind him not only
one, but two remarkable and most effective documents. The farewell to
his people was touching; the farewell to the consuls, for a man of the
character of Sewall, must have cut like a whip. "When the chief Tamasese
and others first moved the present troubles," he wrote, "it was my wish
to punish them and put an end to the rebellion; but I yielded to the
advice of the British and American consuls. Assistance and protection
was repeatedly promised to me and my government, if I abstained from
bringing war upon my country. Relying upon these promises, I did not put
down the rebellion. Now I find that war has been made upon me by the
Emperor of Germany, and Tamasese has been proclaimed king of Samoa. I
desire to remind you of the promises so frequently made by your
government, and trust that you will so far redeem them as to cause the
lives and liberties of my chiefs and people to be respected."

Sewall's immediate adversary was, of course, Becker. I have formed an
opinion of this gentleman, largely from his printed despatches, which I
am at a loss to put in words. Astute, ingenious, capable, at moments
almost witty with a kind of glacial wit in action, he displayed in the
course of this affair every description of capacity but that which is
alone useful and which springs from a knowledge of men's natures. It
chanced that one of Sewall's early moves played into his hands, and he
was swift to seize and to improve the advantage. The neutral territory
and the tripartite municipality of Apia were eyesores to the German
consulate and Brandeis. By landing Tamasese's two or three hundred
warriors at Mulinuu, as Becker himself owns, they had infringed the
treaties, and Sewall entered protest twice. There were two ways of
escaping this dilemma: one was to withdraw the warriors; the other, by
some hocus-pocus, to abrogate the neutrality. And the second had