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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: armed men and issuing proclamations like a ruler, the two other
Powers defying his commands, and at least one of them prepared to
use force in the defiance. Close on its skirts sat the warriors of
Mataafa, perhaps four thousand strong, highly incensed against the
Germans, having all to gain in the seizure of the town and firm,
and, like an army in a fairy tale, restrained by the air-drawn
boundary of the neutral ground.
I have had occasion to refer to the strange appearance in these
islands of an American adventurer with a battery of cannon. The
adventurer was long since gone, but his guns remained, and one of
them was now to make fresh history. It had been cast overboard by
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