jsceecsos scetatestios a eGo a I HEE Wy ea ih i oA a Pe (CPE TS eae ‘‘Leopold II is the absolute Master of the whole of the in- ternal and external activity of the Independent State of the Congo. The organization of justice, the army, the industrial and commercial regimes are established freely by himself. . He would say, and with greater accuracy than did Louis XIV., ‘The State, itis 1.’ Prof. F. Cattier, Brussels University. “Let us repeat after so many others what has become a platitude, the success of the African work is the work of a sole directing will, without being hampered by the hesita- tion of timorous politicians, carried out under his sole respon- sibility,— intelligent, thought- ful, conscious of the perils and the advantages, dis- counting with an admirable prescience the great results of a near future.’”’ AZ. A/fred Pos- kine in “ Bilans Congolais.” — Page 25. >? «< A memorial for the perpetuation of my name. | KING LEOPOLD’S Pe sOLILOQUY A DEFENSE OF HIS CONGO RULE BY MARK TWAIN Mista cks WARREN CO. BOSTON, MASS, 1905 COPYRIGHT, 1905 By Samuet L, CLEMENS King Leopold’s Soliloquy [Throws down pamphlets which he has been reading. Excitedly combs his flowing spread of whiskers with his fingers; pounds the table with his fists; lets off brisk volleys of unsanctified lan- guage at brief intervals, repentantly drooping his head, between volleys, and kissing the Louis XI crucifix hanging from his neck, accompany- ing the kisses with mumbled apologies; presently rises, flushed and perspiring, and walks the floor, gesticulating | —— eee |) It Thad them by the throat! [Hastily kisses the crucifix, and mumbles| In these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemi- spheres quiet, and still these leaks keep on oc- curring. I have spent other millions on religion and art, and what dol get for it? Nothing. Not a compliment. ‘These generosities are studiedly ignored, in print. In print I get noth- ing but slanders—and slanders again—and still slanders, and slanders on top of slanders! Grant them true, what of it? They are slanders all the same, when uttered against a king. Miscreants—they are telling everything! Oh, everything: how I went pilgriming among 3 KING LEOPOLD’S SOUDIEGG@ ys the Powers in tears, with my mouth full of Bible and my pelt oozing piety at every pore, and im- plored them to place the vast and rich and pop- ulous Congo Free State in trust in my hands as their agent, so that I might root out slavery and stop the slave raids, and lift up those twenty-five millions of gentle and harmless blacks out of darkness into light, the light of our blessed Re- deemer, the light that streams from his holy Word, the light that makes glorious our noble civilization—lift them up and dry their tears and fill their bruised hearts with joy and grati- tude—lift them up and make them comprehend that they were no longer outcasts and forsaken, but our very brothers in Christ; how America and thirteen great European states wept in sym- pathy with me, and were persuaded; how their representatives met in convention in Berlin and made me Head Foreman and Superintendent of the Congo State, and drafted out my powers and limitations, carefully guarding the persons and liberties and properties of the natives against hurt and harm; forbidding whisky trafic and gun trafic; providing courts of justice; making commerce free and fetterless to the merchants and traders of all nations, and welcoming and safe-guarding all missionaries of all creeds and denominations. They have told how I planned and prepared my establishment and selected my horde of officials—“‘pals” and ‘‘pimps”’ of mine, 4 mee OPOLD’S SOLILOQUY “unspeakable Belgians” every one—and hoisted my flag, and “‘took in” a President of the United States, and got him to be the first to recognize it and salute it. Oh, well, let them blackguard me if they like; it is a deep satisfaction to me to remember that I was a shade too smart for that nation that thinks itself so smart. Yes, I certainly did bunco a Yankee—as those people | phrase it. Pirate flag? NX Let them call it so— _ fae perhaps it is. All the (i same, they were the first to salute it. These meddlesome American mission- aries! these frank Brit- ish consuls! these blab- bing Belgian-born traitor officials !—those tire- some parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a_ fore- man, but as a sovereign—sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire—sovereign absolute, irres- ponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; bar- ring out all foreign traders but myself; re- stricting commerce to myself, through conces- 5 “They were the first to salute it”’ KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY sionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private ‘“‘swag’’—mine, solely mine—claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine—mine solely—and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter. These pests !—it is as I say, they have kept back nothing! They have revealed these and — | yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about, since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage and immune from re- proach, by right of his selection and appoint- ment to his great office by God himself; a king whose acts cannot be criticized without blas- phemy, since God has observed them from the beginning and has manifested no dissatisfaction with them, nor shown disapproval of them, nor hampered nor interrupted them in any way. By this sign I recognize his approval of what I have done; his cordial and glad approval, I am sure I may say. Blest, crowned, beatified with this great reward, this golden reward, this unspeak- ably precious reward, why should I care for 6 Fre TP BOPROLD’S’ SOLILOOUY= men’s cursings and revilings of me? [With a sudden outburst of feeling| May they roast a million exons in—[ Catches his breath and effu- sively kisses the crucifix; sorrowfully murmurs, “TI shall get myself damned yet, with these indis- cretions of speech.’ | Yes, they go on telling everything, these chat- terers! ‘They tell how I levy incredibly burden- some taxes upon the natives—taxes which are a pure theft; taxes which they must satisfy by gathering rubber under hard and constantly harder conditions, and by raising and furnishing food supplies gratis—and it all comes out that, when they fall short of their tasks through hun- ger, sickness, despair, and ceaseless and exhaust- ing labor without rest, and forsake their homes and flee to the woods to escape punishment, my black soldiers, drawn from unfriendly tribes, and instigated and directed by my Belgians, hunt them down and butcher them and burn their villages—reserving some of the girls. ‘They tell it all: how I am wiping a nation of friend- less creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket’s sake. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there (of a “convenient stripe,” as they phrase it), to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to Him who is all mercy and love, and who 7 KING LEOPOLD'S SODTEGG is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer. They tell only what is against me, they will not tell what is in my favor. They tell how England required of me a Commission of Inquiry into Congo atrocities, and how, to quiet that meddling country, with its disagreeable Congo Reform Association, made up of eails and bishops and John Morleys and university grandees and other dudes, more inter- ested in other people’s business than in their own, I appointed it. Did it stop their mouths? No, they merely pointed out that it was a commis- sion composed wholly of my “Congo butchers,” “the very men whose acts were to be inquired into.” They said it was equivalent to appoint- ing a commission of wolves to inquire into dep- redations committed upon a sheepfold. Noth- ing can satisfy a cursed Englishman |* And are the fault-finders frank with my pri- *Recent information is to the effect that the resident mission- aries found the commission as a whole apparently interested to promote reforms. One of its members was a leading Congo official, another an official of the government in Belgium, the third a Swiss jurist. The commission’s report will reach the public only through the king, and will be whatever he consents to make it; it is not yet forthcoming, though six months have passed since the investigation was made. There is, however, abundant evidence that horrible abuses were found and conceded, the testimony of missionaries, which had been scouted by the king’s defenders, being amply vindicated. One who was present at one hearing of the commission writes: “Men of stone would be moved by the stories that are being unfolded as the commission probes into the awful history of rubber collection. ”” Cer- tain reforms were ordered in the one section visited, but the latest word is that after the commission’s departure, conditions soon be- came worse than before its coming. Very well, then, the king has in- vestigated himself. One stage is achieved. The next one in order is the investigation of conditions in the Congo State by the Powers responsible for the creation of the Congo State. The United States is one of these. Such an_investigation is advocated by Lyman Abbott, Henry Van Dyke, David Starr Jordan and other oe citizens in petitions to the President and Congress.—M. 8 "’__ Page &. . Is against me. << They tell only what Petree eOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY vate character? They could not be more so if I were a plebeian, a peasant, a mechanic. They remind the world that from the earliest days my house has been chapel and brothel combined, and both industries working full time; that I practised cruelties upon my queen and my daughters, and supplemented them with daily shame and humiliations; that, when my queen lay in the happy refuge of her coffin, and a daughter implored me on her knees to let her look for the last time upon her mother’s face, I refused; and that, three years ago, not being satisfied with the stolen spoils of a whole alien nation, I robbed my own child of her property and appeared by proxy in court, a spectacle to the civilized world, to defend the act and com- plete the crime. It is as I have said: they are un- fair, unjust; they will resurrect and give new currency to such things as those, or to any other things that count against me, but they will not mention any act of mine that is in my favor. I have spent more money on art than any other monarch of my time, and they know it. Do they speak of it, do they tell about it? No, they do not. They prefer to work up what they call “‘ghastly statistics” into offensive kindergar- ten object lessons, whose purpose is to make sen- timental people shudder, and prejudice them against me. They remark that “if the innocent blood shed in the Congo State by King Leopold 9 KING LEOPOLD'S 302 were put in buckets and the buckets placed side by side, the line would stretch 2,000 miles; if the skeletons of his ten millions of starved and butchered dead could rise up and march in single file, it would take them seven months and four days to pass a given point; if compacted together in a body, they would occupy more ground than St. Louis covers, World’s Fair and all; if they should all clap their bony hands at once, the grisly crash would be heard at a distance of—”’ Damnation, it makes me tired! And they do similar miracles with the moriey I have distilled from that blood and put into my pocket. They pile it into Egyptian pyramids; they carpet Sa- haras with it; they spread it across the sky, and the shadow it casts makes twilight in the earth. And the tears I have caused, the hearts I have broken—oh, nothing can persuade them to let them alone! [Meditative pause| Well . . . no matter, I did beat the Yankees, anyway! there’s comfort in that. [Reads with mocking smile, the Presi- dent's Order of Recognition of April 22, 1884] ‘s . . . the government of the United States announces its sympathy with and approval of the humane and beney- olent purposes of (my Congo scheme), and will order the officers of the United States, both on land and sea, to rec- ognize its flag as the flag of a friendly government.”’ Possibly the Yankees would like to take that back, now, but they will find that my agents are 10 KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY not over there in America for nothing. But there is no danger; neither nations nor govern- ments can afford to confess a blunder. [With a contented smile, begins to read from “Report by Rev. W. M. Morrison, American mission- ary in the Congo Free State’’ | ««T furnish herewith some of the many atrocious incidents which have come under my own personal observation; they reveal the organized system of plunder and outrage which has been perpetrated and is now being carried on in that unfortu- nate country by King Leopold of Belgium. I say King Leopold, because he and he a/one is now responsible, since he is the absolute sovereign. He styles himself such, When our government in 1884 laid the foundation of the Congo Free State, by recognizing its flag, little did it know that this concern, parading under the guise of philanthropy, was really King Leopold of Belgium, one of the shrewdest, most heart- Jess and most conscienceless rulers that ever sat on a throne. This is apart from his known corrupt morals, which have made his name and his family a byword in two continents. Our government would most certainly not have recognized that flag had it known that it was really King Leopold indi- vidually who was asking for recognition ; had it known that it was setting up in the heart of Africa an absolute monarchy; had it known that, having put down African slavery in our own country at great cost of blood and money, it was estad- lishing a worse form of slavery right in Africa.’’ [With evil joy| Yes, I certainly was a shade too clever for the Yankees. It hurts; it gravels them. They can’t get over it! Puts a shame upon them in another way, too, and a graver II KING LEOPOLD’S= SO way; for they never can rid their records of the reproachful fact that their vain Republic, self- appointed Champion and Promoter of the Liber- ties of the World, is the only democracy in his- tory that has lent its power and influence to the establishing of an absolute monarchy! [Contemplating, with an unfriendly eye, a stately pile of pamphlets] Blister the meddle- some missionaries! ‘They write tons of these things. They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witness- ing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to paper. They are always prowling from place to place; the natives consider them their only friends; they go to them po aes with their sorrows; they with their sorrows” show them their scars and their wounds, inflicted by my soldier police; they hold up the stumps of their arms and lament because their hands have been chopped off, as punishment for not bring- ing in enough rubber, and as proof to be laid be- fore my officers that the required punishment was well and truly carried out. One of these ‘missionaries saw eighty-one of these hands dry- ing over a fire for transmission to my officials— and of course he must go and set it down and I2 Mm KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY _ print it. They travel and travel, they spy and spy! And nothing is too trivial for them to print. [Takes up apamphlet. Reads a passage from Report of a “Journey made in July, August and September, 1903, by Rev. A. E. Scri- vener, a British missionary” | *¢ , . . . Soon we began talking, and without any en- couragement on my part the natives began the tales I had become so accustomed to. ‘They were living in peace and quietness when the white men came in from the lake with all sorts of requests to do this and that, and they thought it _ meant slavery. So they attempted to keep the white men out of their country but without avail. The rifles were too much for them. So they submitted and made up their minds to do the best they could under the altered circumstances. First came the command to build houses for the soldiers, and this was done without a murmur. ‘Then they had to feed the soldiers and all the men and women—hangers on—who accompanied them. ‘Then they were told to bring in rubber. This was quite a new thing for them to do. ‘There was rubber in the forest several days away from their home, but that it was. worth anything was news to them. A small reward was offered and a rush was made for the rubber. ‘What strange white men, to give us cloth and beads for the sap of a wild vine.’ ‘They rejoiced in what they thought their good fortune. But soon the reward was reduced until at last they were told to bring in the rubber for nothing. _ To this they tried to demur ; but to their great surprise several were shot by the soldiers, and the rest were told, with many curses and blows, to go at once or more would be killed. Terrified, they began to prepare their food for the fortnight’s absence from the village which the collection of rubber en- 13 KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY tailed. The soldiers discovered them sitting about. ‘What, not gone yet ?? Bang! bang ! bang ! and down fell one and another, dead, in the midst of wives and companions. There is a terrible wail and an attempt made to prepare the dead for burial, but this is not allowed. All must go at once to the forest. Without food? Yes, without food. And off the poor wretches had to go without even their tinder boxes to make fires. Many died in the forests of hunger and exposure, and still more from the rifles of the ferocious soldiers in charge of the post. In spite of all their efforts the amount fell off and more and more were killed. I was shown around the place, and the sites of former big chiefs’ settlements were pointed out. A careful estimate made the population of, say, seven years ago, to be 2,000 people in and about the post, within a radius of, say, a quarter of a mile. All told, they would not muster 200 now, and there is so much sadness and gloom about them that they are fast decreasing.”’ «< We stayed there all day on Monday and had many talks with the people. On the Sunday some of the boys had told me of some bones which they had seen, so on the Monday I asked to be shown these bones. Lying about on the grass, within a few yards of the house I was occupying, were numbers of human skulls, bones, in some cases complete skeletons. J counted thirty-six skulls, and saw many sets of bones from which the skulls were missing. I called one ot the men and asked the meaning of it. ‘When the rubber palaver began,’ said he, ‘the soldiers shot so many we grew tired of burying, and very often we were not allowed to bury ; and so just dragged the bodies out into the grass and left them. ‘There are hundreds all around if you would like to see them.’ But I had seen more than enough, and was sickened by the stories that came from men and 14 Peat OPOLD’S SOLILOQUY i Ne piling Gs as, Wee A Pints Ts! tT) vies | al £ eo the awful time they had passed through. The | Bulgarian atrocities might be considered as mildness itself when compared with what was done here. How the people submitted I don’t know, Pepe ot and even now I wonder as I think of they hadseen” their patience. That some of them managed to run away is some cause for thankfulness. I stayed there two days and the one thing that impressed itself upon me was the collection of rubber. I saw long files of men come in, as at Bongo, with their little baskets under their arms ; saw them paid their milk tin full of salt, and the two yards of calico flung to the head- men; saw their trembling timidity, and in fact a great deal that all went to prove the state of terrorism that exists and the virtual slavery in which the people are held.’’ That is their way; they spy and spy, and run into print with every foolish trifle. And that British consul, Mr. Casement, is just like them. He gets hold of a diary which had been kept by 15 KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY one of my government officers, and, although it is a private diary and intended for no eye but its owner’s, Mr. Casement is so lacking in delicacy and refinement as to print passages from it. [Reads a passage from the diary] «s Fach time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given him. He must bring back all not used, and for every one used he must bring back a right hand. M. P. told me that sometimes they shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man. As to the extent to which this is carried on, he informed me that in six months the State on the Mambogo River had used 6,000 cartridges, which means that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6,000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill the children with the butt of their guns.”’ When the subtle consul thinks silence will be more effective than words, he employs it. Here he leaves it to be recognized that a thousand killings and mutilations a month is a large out- put for so small a region as the Mambogo River concession, silently indicating the dimensions of it by accompanying his report with a map of the prodigious Congo State, in which there is not room for so small an object as that river. That silence is intended to say, “If it is a thousand a month in this little corner, imagine the output of the whole vast State!” A gentleman would not descend to these furtivenesses. Now as to the mutilations. You can’t head 16 Page 16. nw nw i ¥ y : ws ws Sp) = = DB = w ae > Oa BE o oO Laem | ae a ro) es < oo =< G eg. fe = w ° a = a Os o of = < =i ber oOo te ° oOo kw i 5 vv Rive - Be OD [aj Ox set a, i Sa) we | zac 3 \ i Opie a Ube o Sark} ile ZOrwn dag Saye 4 S2o° oO aw? Ft | a © i ee, zo PRSE Ome 3 a aoe Za <7 Ce bt KFSZo | ° Sis vt < fess ‘ ’ KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY off a Congo critic and make him stay headed- off; he dodges, and straightway comes back at you from another direction. They are full of slippery arts. When the mutilations (severing hands, unsexing men, etc.) began to stir Europe, we hit upon the idea of excusing them with a retort which we judged would knock them dizzy on that subject for good and all, and leave them nothing more to say; to wit, we boldly laid the custom on the natives, and said we did not invent it, but only followed it. Did it knock them dizzy? did it shut their mouths? Not for an hour. They dodged, and came straight back at | us with the remark that ‘if a Christian king can perceive a saving moral difference between in- venting bloody barbarities, and imitating them from savages, for charity’s sake let him get what comfort he can out of his confession!” It is most amazing, the way that that consul acts—that spy, that busy-body. [Takes up pamphlet “Treatment of Women and Children in the Congo State; what Mr. Casement Saw in 1903”| Hardly two years ago! Intrud- ing that date upon the public was a piece of cold malice. It was intended to weaken the force of my press syndicate’s assurances to the public that my severities in the Congo ceased, and ceased utterly, years and years ago. This man is fond of trifles—revels in them, gloats over them, pets them, fondles them, sets them 17 KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY all down. One doesn’t need to drowse through his monotonous report to see that; the mere sub- headings of its chapters prove it. [Reads] <«<'T'wo hundred and forty persons, men, women and children, compelled to supply government with ome ton of carefully prepared foodstuffs per week, receiving in remuneration, all told, the princely sum of 15s. 1od!”’ Very well, it was liberal. It was not much short of a penny a week for each nigger. It suits this consul to belittle it, yet he knows very well that I could have had both the food and the labor for nothing. I can prove it by a thousand instances. [Reads | <<‘ Expedition against a village behindhand in its (com- pulsory) supplies; result, slaughter of sixteen persons; among them three women and a boy of five years. ‘Ten carried off, to be prisoners till ransomed ; among them a child, who died during the march.”’ But he is careful not to explain that we are obliged to resort to ransom to collect debts, where the people have nothing to pay with. Families that escape to the woods sell some of their members into slavery and thus provide the ransom. He knows that I would stop this if I could find a less objectionable way to collect their debts. . . . Mm—here is some more of. the consul’s delicacy! He reports a conversation he had with some natives: Q. <«*How do you know it was the white men them- 18 Pr be eerste LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY selves who ordered these cruel things to be done to you? These things must have been done without the white man’s knowledge by the black soldiers.’’ “A. «The white men told their soldiers : « You only kill _ women; you cannot kill men. You must prove that you kill men.’ So then the soldiers when they killed us’’ (here he stopped and hesitated and then pointing to. . . he said:) ‘then they . . . and took them to the white men, who said: ‘It is true, you have killed mez.’ ”’ OQ. <? ° ked around everywhere Ictures get snea meee EP EhOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY Graveyard. It is a majestic thought: that is, this ghastliest episode in all human history is the work of one man alone ; one solitary man; just a single individual—Leopold, King of the Belgians. He is personally and solely responsible for all the myriad crimes that have blackened the history of the Congo State. He is so/e master there; he is absolute. He could have prevented the crimes by his mere command ; he could stop them today with a word. He withholds the word. For his pocket’s sake. It seems strange to see a king destroying a nation and lay- ing waste a country for mere sordid money’s sake, and solely and only forthat. Lust of conquest is royal; kings have always exercised that stately vice; we are used to it, by old habit we condone it, perceiving a certain dignity in it; but /wst of money—lust of shillings——lust of nickels—lust of dirty coin, not for the nation’s enrichment but for the king’s alome—this isnew. It distinctly revolts us, we cannot seem to recon- cile ourselves to it, we resent it, we despise it, we say it is shabby, unkingly, out of character. Being democrats we ought to jeer and jest, we ought to rejoice to see the purple dragged in the dirt, but—well, account for it as we may, we don’t. We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood- drenched king, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world-solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sole butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward; and—well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look ; for heis a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us, by ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink 39 KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILO@Um from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shua- der and turn away when we come upon them in print.”’ Why, certainly—that is my protection. And you will continue to do it. I know the human race, FROM PHOTOGRAPH, IKOKO, CONGO STATE ‘‘To THEM it must appear very awful and mysterious.”’—- Joseph Con-- rad, ‘ AN ORIGINAL MISTAKE «« This work of ‘ civilization’ is an enormous and continual butchery.” ‘‘ All the facts we brought forward in this cham- ber were denied at first most energetically ; but later, little _ by little, they were proved by documents and by official texts.”’ «The practice of cutting off hands is said to be contrary to instructions; but you are content to say that indulgence must be shown and that this bad habit must be corrected ‘little by little” and you plead, moreover, that only the hands of fallen enemies are cut off, and that if hands are cut off ‘enemies’ not quite dead, and who, after recovery, have had the bad taste to come to the missionaries and show them their stumps, it was due to an original mistake in thinking that they were dead.”’ From Debate in Bel- gian FParhament, July, 190}. OUGHT KING LEOPOLD TO BE HANGED?* INTERVIEW BY MR. W. T. STEAD WITH THE REV. JOHN H, HARRIS, BARINGA, CONGO STATE, IN THE ENGLISH REVIEW OF REVIEWS FOR SEPTEMBER, 1905. For the somewhat startling suggestion in the heading ot this interview, the missionary interviewed is in no way responsible. ‘The credit of it, or, if you like, the discredit, belongs entirely to the editor of the Review, who, without dogmatism, wishes to pose the question as a matter for serious discussion. Since Charles I’s head was cut off, opposite Whitehall, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, the sanc- tity which doth hedge about a king has been held in slight and scant regard by the Puritans and their descendants. Hence there is nothing antecedently shocking or outrageous in the discussion of the question whether the acts of any Sovereign are such as to justify the calling in of the services of the public executioner. It is not, of course, for a journal- ist to pronounce judgment, but no function of the public writer is so imperative as that of calling attention to great wrongs, and no duty is more imperious than that of insisting that no rank or station should be allowed to shield from justice the real criminal when he is once discovered. The controversy between the Congo Reform Association and the Emperor of the Congo has now arrived at a stage in which it is necessary to take a further step towards the *The above article which comes to hand as the foregoing is in press is commended to the king and to readers of his Soliloguy.— M. T. 45 SUPPLEMENTARY redress of unspeakable wrongs and the punishment of no less unspeakable criminals. ‘The Rev. J. H. Harris, an English missionary, has lived for the last seven years in that region of Central Africa — the Upper Congo — which King Leo- pold has made over to one of his vampire groups of financial associates (known as the A.B.I.R. Society) on the strictly business basis of a half share in the profits wrung from the blood and misery of the natives. He has now returned to England, and last month he called, at Mowbray House to tell me the Jatest from the Congo. Mr. Harris is a young man ina dangerous state of volcanic fury, and no wonder. | After living for seven years face to face with the devastations of the vampire State, it is impossible to deny that he does well to be angry. When he began, as is the wont of those who have emerged from the depths, to detail horrifying stories of murder, the outrage and torture of women, the mutilation of children, and the whole infernal category of horrors, served up with the background of cannibalism, sometimes voluntary and sometimes, incredible though it seems, enforced by the orders of the officers, I cut him short, and said : — << Dear Mr, Harris, as in Oriental despatches the India Office translator abbreviates the first page of the letter into two words ‘after compliments,’ or ‘a.c.,’ so let us abbre- viate our conversation about the Congo by the two words ‘after atrocities,’ or ‘a.a.” ‘They are so invariable and so monotonous, as Lord Percy remarked in the House the other day, that it is unnecessary to insist upon them. ‘There is no longer any dispute in the mind of any reasonable person as to what is going on in the Congo. It is the economical exploitation of half a continent carried on by the use of armed force wielded by officials the aim-all and be-all of whose existence is to extort the maximum amount of 46 | | | | | | | | OUGHT KING LEOPOLD TO BE HANGED? rubber in the shortest possible time in order to pay the largest possible dividend to the holders of shares in the con- cessions,”’ «*Well,’’ said Mr. Harris reluctantly, for he is so ac- customed to speaking to persons who require to be told the whole dismal tale from A to Z, <‘what is it you want to know ?’”’ «? panies in extorting rubber. They are like men who are dumb and deaf and blind, nor do they wish to be otherwise. In two or three years they vanish, giving place to other migrants as ignorant as themselves, whereas the missionaries remain on the spot year after year; they are in personal ‘touch with the people, whose language they speak, whose customs they respect, and whose lives they endeavor to defend to the best of their ability.”’ «« But, Mr. Harris,’’ I remarked, <« was there not a cer- tain Mr, Grenfell, a Baptist Missionary, who has been all these years a convinced upholder of the Congo State ?”? ««? ‘Twas true,’’ said Mr. Harris, <¢and pity ’tis ’twas true ; but ’tis no longer true. Mr. Grenfell has had his eyes opened at last, and he has now taken his place among those who are convinced. He could no longer resist the over- whelming evidence that has been brought against the Congo Administration.’’ * «‘Was the nature of the Commissioners’ report,’’ I re- sumed, ‘‘made known to the officials of the State before they left the Congo? ”’ ‘To the head officials—yes,’’ said Mr. Harris. ‘sWith what result? ”’ «