  "Perhaps Apia is not so unimportant to us as you may think," he blurted out impatiently when I told him it had always seemed strange to me that Germany had kept a man of Cabinet calibre (Solf had recently been recalled to Berlin to become Colonial Secretary) for a decade in a colony which appeared to have but the slightest of political and commercial prospects. "Or, at least, we are hopeful of developing a considerable trade there in time," he added somewhat confusedly, as though his first hasty words might have implied more than he intended. But there is little doubt that that inadvertent implication pointed to the truth. The Samoas, at the crossroads of the Southern Seas, may well have been intended to become the seat of the German Pacific insular empire when Deutschland Ueber Alles had become an accomplished fact in the rest of the world. It is easy to understand how the Junkers of the Pan-German party may have deemed the blazing the way for such a consummation a task not too small for the powers of the suave and diplomatic Solf. The latter's broad humanitarianism (in which I have never ceased to believe) can have had nothing to do with his appointment. He was the only German colonial official I ever met who appeared to have anything approaching the interest in the welfare of the native population under him which one expects as a matter of course in the Briton or American occupying a similar position. Dr. Solf's later record will be readily recalled. Holding one or another Cabinet portfolios during all of the war, he was Foreign Minister at the time of the signing of the Armistice. At the present moment he is being prominently mentioned as the first after-the-war Ambassador to Washington. I can think of no one of his countrymen so likely to fill acceptably what at best must be an incalculably trying post. L. R. F. |
|
