But Weber was not yet content.  The law had to be enforced; property, or at least the property of the firm, must be respected.  And during an absence of the consul’s, he seems to have drawn up with his own hand, and certainly first showed to the king, in his own house, a new convention.  Weber here and Weber there.  As an able man, he was perhaps in the right to prepare and propose conventions.  As the head of a trading company, he seems far out of his part to be communicating state papers to a sovereign.  The administration of justice was the colour, and I am willing to believe the purpose, of the new paper; but its effect was to depose the existing government.  A council of two Germans and two Samoans were to be invested with the right to make laws and impose taxes as might be “desirable for the common interest of the Samoan government and the German residents.”  The provisions of this council the king and vice-king were to sign blindfold.  And by a last hardship, the Germans, who received all the benefit, reserved a right to recede from the agreement on six months’ notice; the Samoans, who suffered all the loss, were bound by it in perpetuity.  I can never believe that my friend Dr. Stuebel had a hand in drafting these proposals; I am only surprised he should have been a party to enforcing them, perhaps the chief error in these islands of a man who has made few.  And they were enforced with a rigour that seems injudicious.  The Samoans (according to their own account) were denied a copy of the document; they were certainly rated and threatened; their deliberation was treated as contumacy; two German war-ships lay in port, and it was hinted that these would shortly intervene.

Succeed in frightening a child, and he takes refuge in duplicity.  “Malietoa,” one of the chiefs had written, “we know well we are in bondage to the great governments.”  It was now thought one tyrant might be better than three, and any one preferable to Germany.  On the 5th November 1885, accordingly, Laupepa, Tamasese, and forty-eight high chiefs met in secret, and the supremacy of Samoa was secretly offered to Great Britain for the second time in history.  Laupepa and Tamasese still figured as king and vice-king in the eyes of Dr. Stuebel; in their own, they had secretly abdicated, were become private persons, and might do what they pleased without binding or dishonouring their country.  On the morrow, accordingly, they did public humiliation in the dust before the consulate, and five days later signed the convention.  The last was done, it is claimed, upon an impulse.  The humiliation, which it appeared to the Samoans so great a thing to offer, to the practical mind of Dr. Stuebel seemed a trifle to receive; and the pressure was continued and increased.  Laupepa and Tamasese were both heavy, well-meaning, inconclusive men.  Laupepa, educated for the ministry, still bears some marks of it in character and appearance; Tamasese was in private of an amorous and sentimental turn, but no