round an
election in the present disordered condition of the government,"
Malietoa Laupepa shall be recognised as king, "unless the three Powers
shall by common accord otherwise declare." But perhaps few natives have
followed it so far, and even those who have, were possibly all cast
abroad again by the next clause: "and his successor shall be duly
elected according to the laws and customs of Samoa." The right to elect,
freely given in one sentence, was suspended in the next, and a line or
so further on appeared to be reconveyed by a side-wind. The reason
offered for suspension was ludicrously false; in May 1889, when Sir
Edward Malet moved the matter in the conference, the election of Mataafa
was not only certain to have been peaceful, it could not have been
opposed; and behind the English puppet it was easy to suspect the hand
of Germany. No one is more swift to smell trickery than a Samoan; and
the thought, that, under the long, bland, benevolent sentences of the
Berlin Act, some trickery lay lurking, filled him with the breath of
opposition. Laupepa seems never to have been a popular king. Mataafa, on
the other hand, holds an unrivalled position in the eyes of his
fellow-countrymen; he was the hero of the war, he had lain with them in
the bush, he had borne the heat and burthen of the day; they began to
claim that he should enjoy more largely the fruits of victory; his
exclusion was believed to be a stroke of German vengeance, his elevation
to the kingship was looked for as the fitting crown and copestone of the
Samoan triumph; and but a little after the coming of the chief justice,
an ominous cry for Mataafa began to arise in the islands. It is
difficult to see what that official could have done but what he did. He
was loyal, as in duty bound, to the treaty and to Laupepa; and when the
orators of the important and unruly islet of Manono demanded to his face
a change of kings, he had no choice but to refuse them, and (his reproof
being unheeded) to suspend the meeting. Whether by any neglect of his
own or the mere force of circumstance, he failed, however, to secure the
sympathy, failed even to gain the confidence, of Mataafa. The latter is
not without a sense of his own abilities or of the great service he has
rendered to his native land. He felt himself neglected; at the very
moment when the cry for his elevation rang throughout the group, he
thought himself made little of on Mulinuu; and he began to weary of his
p