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.
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