In the
eyes of the Samoan the place has the attraction of a park for the holiday
schoolboy, of a granary for mice. We must add the yet more lively
allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent miles
there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal. For the Samoan besides,
there is something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd in the idea of thus
growing food only to send it from the land and sell it. A man at home
who should turn all Yorkshire into one wheatfield, and annually burn his
harvest on the altar of Mumbo-Jumbo, might impress ourselves not much
otherwise. And the firm which does these things is quite extraneous, a
wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but to itself; few
natives drawing from it so much as day's wages; and the rest beholding in
it only the occupier of their acres. The nearest villages have suffered
most; they see over the hedge the lands of their ancestors waving with
useless cocoa-palms; and the sales were often questionable, and must
still more often appear so to regretful natives, spinning and improving
yarns about the evening lamp. At the worst, then, to help oneself from
the plantation will seem to a Samoan very like orchard-breaking to the
British schoolboy; at the best, it will be thought a gallant
Robin-Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.
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