rica were the chief source of palm oil and the Germans had the
handling of it. During the war the British Government assumed control of
the palm oil products of the British and German colonies and prohibited
their export to other countries than England. Americans protested and
beseeched, but in vain. The British held, quite correctly, that they
needed all the oil they could get for food and lubrication and
nitroglycerin. But the British also needed canned meat from America for
their soldiers and when it was at length brought to their attention that
the packers could not ship meat unless they had cans and that cans could
not be made without tin and that tin could not be made without palm oil
the British Government consented to let us buy a little of their palm
oil. The lesson is that of Voltaire's story, "Candide," "Let us
cultivate our own garden"--and plant a few palm trees in it--also rubber
trees, but that is another story.

The international struggle for oil led to the partition of the Pacific
as the struggle for rubber led to the partition of Africa. Theodor
Weber, as Stevenson says, "harried the Samoans" to get copra much as
King Leopold of Belgium harried the Congoese to get caoutchouc. It was
Weber who first fully realized that the South Sea islands, formerly
given over to cannibals, pirates and missionaries, might be made
immensely valuable through the cultivation of the coconut palms. When
the ripe coconut is split open and exposed to the sun the meat dries up
and shrivels and in this form, called "copra," it can be cut out and
shipped to the factory where the oil is extracted and refined. Weber
while German Consul in Samoa was also manager of what was locally known
as "the long-handled concern" (_Deutsche Handels und Plantagen
Gesellschaft der Suedsee Inseln zu Hamburg_), a pioneer commercial and
semi-official corporation that played a part in the Pacific somewhat
like the British Hudson Bay Company in Canada or East India Company in
Hindustan. Through the agency of this corporation on the start Germany
acquired a virtual monopoly of the transportation and refining of
coconut oil and would have become the dominant power in the Pacific if
she had not been checked by force of arms. In Apia Bay in 1889 and again
in Manila Bay in 1898 an American fleet faced a German fleet ready for
action while a British warship lay between. So we rescued the
Philippines and Samoa from German rule and in 1914 German power was
el