第10章 THE ELEMENTS OF DISCORD:FOREIGN(5)

Captain Zembsch superseded him with an imperial appointment,one still remembered in Samoa as "the gentleman who acted justly."There was no house to be found,and the new consul must take up his quarters at first under the same roof with Weber.On several questions,in which the firm was vitally interested,Zembsch embraced the contrary opinion.Riding one day with an Englishman in Vailele plantation,he was startled by a burst of screaming,leaped from the saddle,ran round a house,and found an overseer beating one of the thralls.He punished the overseer,and,being a kindly and perhaps not a very diplomatic man,talked high of what he felt and what he might consider it his duty to forbid or to enforce.The firm began to look askance at such a consul;and worse was behind.A number of deeds being brought to the consulate for registration,Zembsch detected certain transfers of land in which the date,the boundaries,the measure,and the consideration were all blank.He refused them with an indignation which he does not seem to have been able to keep to himself;and,whether or not by his fault,some of these unfortunate documents became public.

It was plain that the relations between the two flanks of the German invasion,the diplomatic and the commercial,were strained to bursting.But Weber was a man ill to conquer.Zembsch was recalled;and from that time forth,whether through influence at home,or by the solicitations of Weber on the spot,the German consulate has shown itself very apt to play the game of the German firm.That game,we may say,was twofold,-the first part even praiseworthy,the second at least natural.On the one part,they desired an efficient native administration,to open up the country and punish crime;they wished,on the other,to extend their own provinces and to curtail the dealings of their rivals.In the first,they had the jealous and diffident sympathy of all whites;in the second,they had all whites banded together against them for their lives and livelihoods.It was thus a game of BEGGAR MYNEIGHBOUR between a large merchant and some small ones.Had it so remained,it would still have been a cut-throat quarrel.But when the consulate appeared to be concerned,when the war-ships of the German Empire were thought to fetch and carry for the firm,the rage of the independent traders broke beyond restraint.And,largely from the national touchiness and the intemperate speech of German clerks,this scramble among dollar-hunters assumed the appearance of an inter-racial war.

The firm,with the indomitable Weber at its head and the consulate at its back -there has been the chief enemy at Samoa.No English reader can fail to be reminded of John Company;and if the Germans appear to have been not so successful,we can only wonder that our own blunders and brutalities were less severely punished.Even on the field of Samoa,though German faults and aggressors make up the burthen of my story,they have been nowise alone.Three nations were engaged in this infinitesimal affray,and not one appears with credit.They figure but as the three ruffians of the elder play-wrights.The United States have the cleanest hands,and even theirs are not immaculate.It was an ambiguous business when a private American adventurer was landed with his pieces of artillery from an American war-ship,and became prime minister to the king.

It is true (even if he were ever really supported)that he was soon dropped and had soon sold himself for money to the German firm.Iwill leave it to the reader whether this trait dignifies or not the wretched story.And the end of it spattered the credit alike of England and the States,when this man (the premier of a friendly sovereign)was kidnapped and deported,on the requisition of an American consul,by the captain of an English war-ship.I shall have to tell,as I proceed,of villages shelled on very trifling grounds by Germans;the like has been done of late years,though in a better quarrel,by ourselves of England.I shall have to tell how the Germans landed and shed blood at Fangalii;it was only in 1876that we British had our own misconceived little massacre at Mulinuu.I shall have to tell how the Germans bludgeoned Malietoa with a sudden call for money;it was something of the suddenest that Sir Arthur Gordon himself,smarting under a sensible public affront,made and enforced a somewhat similar demand.