Goldsboro weekly argus. [volume] (Goldsboro, N.C.) 1885-1909, 1895-01-10
GOLDSBORO. N. c., JAN. :, 1895.
STEVENSON AND SAMOA.

of his life in far-off Samoa, the
coantry of his adoption, which
he loved with the tenderness of
a great heart for a suffering peo-
pie.
Stevenson was a Scot. Chance
and the search for a mild climate
carried him to Samoa, and as it
was decreed, he arrived there at
a time when the curse of Civil
cation" was threatening a noble
people with all that the misused
word implies, He wrote a book;
which he modestly styled "A
Footnote to History" with the
subtitle, Eight Years of Trou-
bic in Samoa" Contrary to his
early religious teachings and ira
ditions, he espoused in it the
cause of the grandest parsonage
in Samoan history, as applied to
that obscure group of islands. Re
member that geographical dimen-
sions have ever been the slight
est of factors in measuring the
Importance of nations.
Stevenson went to Samoa, ut
terly unprecedented. AS a British
subject, his sympathies would
naturally have been on one side.
AS an honest man, he was inn
PEELED to take the side of the
American party, when there was
a pro-American policy in Wash
ington concerning Samoa, ard of
the chieftain Mataafa, who
proved his Christianity by saw
ing the lives of his German enc
mics in the awful calamity of
Apia Bay, on March Is. 1889.
Mataafa is in exile to-day. Mr..
Secretary Gresham, the extraor-
binary custodian of American
honor, thinks that the best thing
for the United States is to with
draw entirely from Samoa, as
we'll as from Hawaii. What are
those savage countries to us? he
asks.
Nothing, it may be answered,
save important outposts in the
great ocean which, in the imme-
date future, is to be the political
and commercial centre of the
planet. Once the Mediterranean
Ocean was literally the middle
sea" of all the earth. America
was discovered and the Atlantic
Ocean forthwith became the great
highway of nations. Now the
world has shifted it's centre of
gravity and the Pacific has taken
the place once held by the little
Mediterranean and later by the
Western Ocean. Dwellers on our
Pacific coast no longer look to the
East, but to the West. Japan
with it's forty millions has be-
come as important as England;
China with it's four hundred mil
lions is not to be ignored, if only
out of respect for the impressive
figures. The intermediate lands.
few and otherwise unimportant,
achieve a serious dignity by vir-
tue of their mere position. The
Pacific Ocean is the great high
way of the coming century and
of countless centuries to follow.
The United States should con-
troll it's Eastern entry by the
Nicaragua Canal, at any cost. It
should command every point of
vantage on the hither side of the
worlds new Middle Sea.
The brilliant. Scotsman just
dead saw all these truths with
the eyes of "a poet, and with
the and with the foresight
of a man superior to ma
tional predictions he hoped that
America would not fail to see
them. A greater poet than
Stevenson, though not his equal
as a prose writer, John Boyle
O'Reilly, said five years ago,
after his first and only visit to
the Pacific Coast: 1.-The people
of California and Oregon and
Washington do not look to the
East but to the West. The At
lantic Ocean is nothing to them;
the Pacific is everything" Since
then the birth of new Japan has
taken place; the new republic
of Hawaii has come into being;
the Samoan question has leaped
from a provincial consideration
to that of a most momentous in
ternational problem. The Nicar-
aguan Canal is to be in the near
future the great thoroughfare of
the world, the key to interna-
tional tarde and supremacy.