lic
servant, Dr. Stuebel. I should be a dishonest man if I did not bear
testimony to the loyalty since shown by Germans in Samoa. Their position
was painful; they had talked big in the old days, now they had to sing
small. Even Stuebel returned to the islands under the prejudice of an
unfortunate record. To the minds of the Samoans his name represented
the beginning of their sorrows; and in his first term of office he had
unquestionably driven hard. The greater his merit in the surprising
success of the second. So long as he stayed, the current of affairs
moved smoothly; he left behind him on his departure all men at peace;
and whether by fortune, or for the want of that wise hand of guidance,
he was scarce gone before the clouds began to gather once more on our
horizon.

Before the first convention, Germany and the States hauled down their
flags. It was so done again before the second; and Germany, by a still
more emphatic step of retrogression, returned the exile Laupepa to his
native shores. For two years the unfortunate man had trembled and
suffered in the Cameroons, in Germany, in the rainy Marshalls. When he
left (September 1887) Tamasese was king, served by five iron war-ships;
his right to rule (like a dogma of the Church) was placed outside
dispute; the Germans were still, as they were called at that last
tearful interview in the house by the river, "the invincible strangers";
the thought of resistance, far less the hope of success, had not yet
dawned on the Samoan mind. He returned (November 1889) to a changed
world. The Tupua party was reduced to sue for peace, Brandeis was
withdrawn, Tamasese was dying obscurely of a broken heart; the German
flag no longer waved over the capital; and over all the islands one
figure stood supreme. During Laupepa's absence this man had succeeded
him in all his honours and titles, in tenfold more than all his power
and popularity. He was the idol of the whole nation but the rump of the
Tamaseses, and of these he was already the secret admiration. In his
position there was but one weak point,--that he had even been tacitly
excluded by the Germans. Becker, indeed, once coquetted with the thought
of patronising him; but the project had no sequel, and it stands alone.
In every other juncture of history the German attitude has been the
same. Choose whom you will to be king; when he has failed, choose whom
you please to succeed him; when the second fails also, replace the
first: upo