Coming years and other historians will declare the influence of that.
CHAPTER XI--LAUPEPA AND MATAAFA
1889-1892
With the hurricane, the broken war-ships, and the stranded sailors, I am
at an end of violence, and my tale flows henceforth among carpet
incidents. The blue-jackets on Apia beach were still jealously held
apart by sentries, when the powers at home were already seeking a
peaceable solution. It was agreed, so far as might be, to obliterate two
years of blundering; and to resume in 1889, and at Berlin, those
negotiations which had been so unhappily broken off at Washington in
1887. The example thus offered by Germany is rare in history; in the
career of Prince Bismarck, so far as I am instructed, it should stand
unique. On a review of these two years of blundering, bullying, and
failure in a little isle of the Pacific, he seems magnanimously to have
owned his policy was in the wrong. He left Fangalii unexpiated; suffered
that house of cards, the Tamasese government, to fall by its own frailty
and without remark or lamentation; left the Samoan question openly and
fairly to the conference: and in the meanwhile, to allay the local heats
engendered by Becker and Knappe, he sent to Apia that invaluable public
servant, Dr.
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