The event was hailed with acclamation,and there was much about the new official to increase the hopes already entertained.He was seen to be a man of culture and ability;in public,of an excellent presence -in private,of a most engaging cordiality.But there was one point,I scarce know whether to say of his character or policy,which immediately and disastrously affected public feeling in the islands.He had an aversion,part judicial,part perhaps constitutional,to haste;and he announced that,until he should have well satisfied his own mind,he should do nothing;that he would rather delay all than do aught amiss.It was impossible to hear this without academical approval;impossible to hear it without practical alarm.The natives desired to see activity;they desired to see many fair speeches taken on a body of deeds and works of benefit.Fired by the event of the war,filled with impossible hopes,they might have welcomed in that hour a ruler of the stamp of Brandeis,breathing hurry,perhaps dealing blows.And the chief justice,unconscious of the fleeting opportunity,ripened his opinions deliberately in Mulinuu;and had been already the better part of half a year in the islands before he went through the form of opening his court.The curtain had risen;there was no play.A reaction,a chill sense of disappointment,passed about the island;and intrigue,one moment suspended,was resumed.
In the Berlin Act,the three Powers recognise,on the threshold,"the independence of the Samoan government,and the free right of the natives to elect their chief or king and choose their form of government."True,the text continues that,"in view of the difficulties that surround 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 part.In this humour,he was exposed to a temptation which I must try to explain,as best I may be able,to Europeans.
The bestowal of the great name,Malietoa,is in the power of the district of Malie,some seven miles to the westward of Apia.The most noisy and conspicuous supporters of that party are the inhabitants of Manono.Hence in the elaborate,allusive oratory of Samoa,Malie is always referred to by the name of PULE (authority)as having the power of the name,and Manono by that of AINGA (clan,sept,or household)as forming the immediate family of the chief.