Within the memory of man, the white people of Apia lay in the worst squalor of degradation.  They are now unspeakably improved, both men and women.  To-day they must be called a more than fairly respectable population, and a much more than fairly intelligent.  The whole would probably not fill the ranks of even an English half-battalion, yet there are a surprising number above the average in sense, knowledge, and manners.  The trouble (for Samoa) is that they are all here after a livelihood.  Some are sharp practitioners, some are famous (justly or not) for foul play in business.  Tales fly.  One merchant warns you against his neighbour; the neighbour on the first occasion is found to return the compliment:  each with a good circumstantial story to the proof.  There is so much copra in the islands, and no more; a man’s share of it is his share of bread; and commerce, like politics, is here narrowed to a focus, shows its ugly side, and becomes as personal as fisticuffs.  Close at their elbows, in all this contention, stands the native looking on.  Like a child, his true analogue, he observes, apprehends, misapprehends, and is usually silent.  As in a child, a considerable intemperance of speech is accompanied by some power of secrecy.  News he publishes; his thoughts have often to be dug for.  He looks on at the rude career of the dollar-hunt, and wonders.  He sees these men rolling in a luxury beyond the ambition of native kings; he hears them accused by each other of the meanest trickery; he knows some of them to be guilty; and what is he to think?  He is strongly conscious of his own position as the common milk-cow; and what is he to do?  “Surely these white men on the beach are not great chiefs?” is a common question, perhaps asked with some design of flattering the person questioned.  And one, stung by the last incident into an unusual flow of English, remarked to me:  “I begin to be weary of white men on the beach.”

But the true centre of trouble, the head of the boil of which Samoa languishes, is the German firm.  From the conditions of business, a great island house must ever be an inheritance of care; and it chances that the greatest still afoot has its chief seat in Apia bay, and has sunk the main part of its capital in the island of Upolu.  When its founder, John Caesar Godeffroy, went bankrupt over Russian paper and Westphalian iron, his most considerable asset was found to be the South Sea business.  This passed (I understand) through the hands of Baring Brothers in London, and is now run by a company rejoicing in the Gargantuan name of the Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft fur Sud-See Inseln zu Hamburg.  This piece of literature is (in practice) shortened to the D. H. and P. G., the Old Firm, the German Firm, the Firm, and (among humorists) the Long Handle Firm.  Even from the deck of an approaching ship, the island is seen to bear its signature—­zones of cultivation showing in a more vivid tint of green