The question of labour, therefore, has always been a pressing one on the plantations; and to provide this Chinese have been imported under indentures, and by Chinese labour all the work is carried on. From the time of their first gaining a footing in Samoa, the Germans began to oust the natives from the land; and as the Samoans could not be got to work, plantations were established under German managers who proceeded to extract from it, by means of the cheapest foreign labour procurable, as much as it would yield. At Apia, which Stevenson describes as the seat of the political sickness of Samoa, a controlling German firm was established who gradually obtained possession of the most fertile lands, but their titles were at times of the flimsiest. The same writer describes how a visitor would observe, near an ancient Samoan village which he had been informed was the proper residence of the Samoan kings, a notice-board set up indicating that the historic village was the property of the German firm. These boards, he adds, which were among the commonest features of the landscape, might be rather taken to imply that the claim had been disputed. If the "sales" of land from the natives to the German firm were questionable, the Samoans beheld in the firm only the occupier of _their_ land, and consequently regarded the constant raiding of the German plantations and the stealthy gathering of the cocoa-nuts merely in the light of a very trifling peccadillo, and certainly not as theft. Such land as the firm was unable to find labour to work was "mortgaged" to natives, who were compelled, under a penalty of imprisonment, to sell their copra to no one except to the mortgagee. The firm, which Stevenson describes as "the true centre of trouble, the head of the boil," of which Samoa languished thus gradually, got into its own hands the practical monopoly of trade. The trade of the islands of the South Pacific was, as previously stated, always regarded in Europe as a most valuable one; and when in 1711 a monopoly of trade with South America and the Pacific Islands was granted to the South Sea Company in England, its riches were popularly looked upon as illimitable and the shares of the South Sea Company stood at one time at a premium of 900 per cent. The bursting of the "South Sea Bubble," however, was the end of monopolies until the era of the German firm, whose agents gained a preponderance even in Fiji. The principal article of Samoan trade is copra, and the value of land is assessed according to its growth of cocoa-nuts. The trade was eminently suited for Germans, as the natives readily bartered for cheap and flashy goods "made in Germany." In the vicinity of Apia uncultivated land is worth from £15 to £25 an acre, and cultivated land planted with cocoa-nuts from £20 to £40; while "bush" land faced a value ranging from 8s. to £2.