It has been already related in the preceding chapter how the geographical ardour of the King of the Belgians resulted in the sending of Stanley with an important expedition to explore the Congo. Previous to this enterprise, however, King Leopold II had shown himself deeply interested in the fate of Central Africa. Following on the successful crossing of the continent from the Zanzibar to the Benguela coast by Commander V. L. Cameron, R.N., and his revelation of the richly endowed territories of the Southern Congo basin, King Leopold had summoned to Brussels under his own presidency a conference of geographers, which created an International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa and for the abolition of the Slave Trade which then was really ravaging that region. This International Association soon separated into a number of National Committees; that of Belgium was founded in November, 1876, and in 1877-79 Belgian Expeditions were sent out via Zanzibar to Tanganyika. By August, 1879, Capitaine Cambier (an excellent pioneer), had founded the station of Karema on the south-east Coast of Tanganyika. Captain E. Storms established himself here (together with the White Fathers’ Catholic Mission) in 1880, and set to work to unite the Tanganyika tribes in self-defence against the Arab slave raiders. Storms became quite a hero after beating off the Arab forces with merely native material, hastily drilled as soldiers. By 1885, he had become recognized as the great White Chief and Protector of southern Tanganyika.
In 1879 from out of the Belgian branch of the African International Association there grew the Comité d’Études du Haut Congo, which projected the idea of Stanley’s concluding in its name treaties with the paramount chiefs of the Congo region, treaties by means of which these chiefs should agree to join in a sort of confederation for purposes of mutual support, while at the same time they admitted into their territories the traders who would be sent out by the Committee, which was in some sort to become the suzerain of this Congo Federation. Mr Stanley appears to have been under the impression that the final protectorate over the central Congo would be a British one; until 1884 few people seemed to think that the King of the Belgians would make himself the sovereign of the Congo. In the early eighties a kind of Anglo-French duel had taken place on the Congo, De Brazza representing the French cause and Stanley the British. When it began to dawn on the British Government that the King of the Belgians was working for purely Belgian interests, it occurred to them that there was no reason why England and Portugal might not come to terms, at any rate about the Lower Congo. So the abortive treaty of 1884 was drawn up, but not ratified. Believing that this was a preliminary to a British Protectorate of the Congo, France and Germany joined hands; and a Conference on African affairs was convened at Berlin, the first of a long series of actions taken jointly by the other states of Europe to check the extension of British influence.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 the Congo Independent State[186] was recognized by all the leading powers of Europe as a sovereign state with the King of the Belgians at its head. The boundaries were not definitely fixed, but the west coast of Tanganyika was made the eastern limit; and Captain Storms, to his great chagrin, was recalled. Before giving her consent, however, France reserved to herself the right of preemption over these Congo territories, besides securing by an agreement with the King of the Belgians a large portion of western Congoland. Mr (afterwards Sir Henry) Stanley then ceased to administer the Congo State, and was succeeded first by Sir Frederick Goldsmid, and then by Sir Francis De Winton, who governed for the King of the Belgians, but gave a distinctly English tone to the administration. Mons. Camille Janssen, however, succeeded Sir Francis De Winton in 1886; the international character of the state was dropped; and the British, French, Portuguese, Swedish and German officials were gradually replaced by Belgians, so that by 1891 the entire administration was Belgian. Stanley, however, had once more intervened (in 1887) in the affairs of the Free State, which had got into great difficulties owing to the attacks of the Zanzibar Arabs on the Upper Congo. Stanley temporized, seeking to gain time for the young state, and recognized Tipu Tipu[187], the leading Arab, as Governor for the King of the Belgians over the Upper Congo. Tipu Tipu withdrew about 1890, when the Arab revolt against the Germans had caused grave tension between the Arabs and Europeans in Central Africa. After his withdrawal, the Arabs, who had now become extremely powerful on the Upper Congo, attacked the Belgians in 1892, murdering a trader, Hodister, and the unoffending Emin Pasha, and imprisoning and eventually killing the Belgian resident and his assistant at the Arab capital (Kasongo), besides massacring the men at several outposts. The forces of the State—largely composed of Congo natives with a few Hausas from Nigeria and one or two noteworthy Liberian negroes—were ably led by nineteen Belgian and one English officers, and commanded by Commandant (afterwards created Baron) Dhanis. The English officer referred to was Captain (originally Surgeon) Sidney L. Hinde, afterwards a British official in East Africa.
Dhanis commenced, in July 1892, a most noteworthy campaign from a base—Lusambo—on the Sankuru river. His little army marched through forest paths to the Lomami and thus took the Arabs in flank. From the Lomami the Belgian force gained the banks of the great Lualaba-Congo, and, victory succeeding victory, they captured Nyangwe (the great Slave City of Livingstone’s day) on March 4, 1893, and carried Kasongo (the Arab stronghold) by assault on April 22, 1893. The story, as told by Captain Sidney Hinde[188], of the capture of Nyangwe and Kasongo reads like episodes in an impossible Rider Haggard romance. It was one of the greatest feats of arms, of endurance and splendid courage that the history of Africa can show. By the beginning of 1894, the Belgians had achieved the conquest of the whole of the country up to the west shores of Tanganyika, and the death or expulsion from Congoland of all the Arab leaders. This brilliant episode in Belgian Congo history was however sullied by the judicial murder, in September, 1893, of Gongo Lutete, the great Manyema chief who at the commencement of the struggle with the Arabs had come over to the Belgian side and whose alliance alone made victory possible to the Belgian force. The execution of this warrior chief—without respite or appeal, on no credible evidence of treachery—following a drumhead court-martial presided over by a young Belgian lieutenant, is as painful to read as the preceding campaign of Baron Dhanis against the Arab slave-traders is a source of satisfaction to all interested in the welfare of Africa. The Belgians were eventually to pay dearly for this miscarriage of justice. The remembrance of the death of Gongo Lutete smouldered amongst the negro soldiery he had raised for service with the Belgians; and in 1895 they broke out into open mutiny at Luluabourg and killed their Belgian commanding officer. Baron Dhanis composed this mutiny by punishment and negotiations; but in 1897 the mutiny broke out again amongst those Manyema and Batetela soldiers who had been transferred to the Lado enclave of the Nile basin. The revolt spread far and wide and was not at an end till 1900.
In 1892, King Leopold II, alarmed by the progress of the British South Africa Company, sent out an expedition under Captain Stairs (Stanley’s former Lieutenant—a Nova-Scotian) to occupy in his name the territory of Katanga, which was a debateable land, to some extent under British missionary influence, but claimed as lying within the boundaries of the Congo State. Its king (Msidi) was an Mnyamwezi adventurer and slave trader; nevertheless he had ruled his country with a certain degree of wisdom, and had permitted British missionaries to settle there and British travellers to explore; therefore it was learned with some regret that he had been summarily shot for refusing to hand over his territory to the Belgians. Not content with the gigantic dominion already under his control, the King of the Belgians aspired to extend it to the banks of the White Nile. In 1894 an agreement was concluded with the British Government by which, in exchange for a strip of territory which would enable the latter to connect the northern end of Tanganyika with Uganda, the King of the Belgians took over on lease the administration of territories as far north as the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the White Nile. But this settlement was practically annulled by the subsequent Belgian convention with France, which restricted the northern boundary of the Congo Independent State to the Mbomu affluent of the Wele River, while the King of the Belgians retained for a time the lease of a small patch of territory on the west bank of the White Nile, opposite Lado.
Another event in the recent history of the Congo State, which has caused some anger in England, was the summary execution of the unfortunate Charles Stokes by a Belgian officer named Lothaire. Mr Stokes (who was an Ulster Irishman) had once been a missionary, and used to travel backwards and forwards to Uganda. He then set up for himself as a trader, and, although a British subject, he was sufficiently international in his sympathies to work for the Germans in helping to found their East African colony. In the course of his ivory-trading expeditions he entered the Congo State. It was suspected by Lothaire that he was furnishing the Arabs with powder; he therefore sent a messenger to Stokes, summoning him to his camp. Stokes came unsuspecting. He was put through a cross-examination over-night, and in the early morning taken out of his hut and hanged. In plain language, he was murdered; for not only did he receive no trial, but at that time British consular jurisdiction was maintained in the Congo State, and no sufficient evidence was brought forward to show that Stokes had sold any powder to the Arabs, or done anything worthy of death. Major Lothaire was tried for the murder of Stokes both at Boma and again at Brussels, but was pronounced not guilty at each trial, and was regarded by a portion of the Belgian press as having been a national hero. He was, however, eventually dismissed from the service of the Congo Free State, and an indemnity of £6000 was paid to the child of Stokes.
In July 1898, there was opened for public use (largely through the enterprise of Colonel Thys) a railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool, about 250 miles long, which had taken about 8½ years to construct, but which, once finished, was of enormous aid in the development of the natural resources of Congoland. Matadi is a port on the lower Congo (110 miles from the sea), up to which ocean-going steamers are able to ascend. From Léopoldville on Stanley Pool there are between 4000 and 5000 miles of navigable waterways along which steamers and steam-launches can penetrate into the hinterland of French Congo and the Cameroons, to within a few days’ journey of the Central Sudan (Shari basin) and the Egyptian Sudan, German East Africa and Rhodesia.
But the effects which followed the opening of this railway were different from King Leopold’s anticipations. It was discovered—slowly—by European public opinion that one of the boldest outrages on international law and equity known to history had been perpetrated by the man who had posed before Europe in 1876 as a disinterested philanthropist desirous of devoting his spare funds to the realization of Livingstone’s ideals, and to the regeneration of Negro Africa. By means of Stanley he had between 1879 and 1885 founded his Congo Independent State, basing his right to call himself “Roi-Souverain” of this vast dominion on a number of treaties made by his agents in the region now known as French Congo, and also along both banks of the main Congo river from the sea upwards to the Kwa-Kasai confluence; that is to say, over only one-fortieth part of the area he claimed to govern by the assent of its native chiefs as well as of Europe.
Two of the numerous conditions imposed on his government of the Congo were freedom of trade throughout the Congo basin, and the right of missionaries to travel, to settle, and to build where they would, without hindrance. Yet no sooner was King Leopold II acknowledged internationally as King-Sovereign of the Congo State than he began to set on one side all such stipulations of the Act of Berlin as fettered his intentions of self-enrichment and unquestionable autocracy. Freedom of trade, except at the mouth and along the estuarine Congo, became an impossibility. By 1890, in the Congo basin above Stanley Pool, ivory had been constituted a State monopoly; and rubber was soon placed in much the same category. Commerce was chiefly restricted to the State, and to one Dutch and various Belgian firms, though commercial agencies on the Lower Congo were still maintained by merchants of other nations. This policy on the part of the Congo State, which on the strength of its philanthropic assurances had obtained permission in 1891 to levy import duties, was much criticized, and led to some alienation of sympathy in England. Added to this were the extraordinary stories of atrocities which began to be spread by British, American, and Swedish missionaries. It was said that, to enforce the payment of tribute in ivory and rubber, the Belgian officials ordered their negro subordinates to cut off the hands of all who refused payment. It was stated that the natives were plunged into a slavery worse than anything the Arabs had introduced, that they were shot down for trifling causes, and that the negro police and soldiers of the State were allowed without hindrance to devour the bodies of the slain in battle. These charges in some cases were scarcely credible as applied to the actions of civilized human beings; King Leopold in 1896 instituted a committee of missionaries to enquire into them, and to offer suggestions for better methods of administration. But the committee was fettered in many ways and prevented from obtaining evidence. The charge of permitting cannibalism has been substantiated by the accounts of Captain S. L. Hinde, already referred to, and by other British officers in the Congo service. The fact was, that a territory nearly as large as Brazil had been handed over to be governed by a number of young Belgian officers and the employés of a few concessionaire companies. The subordinates whom they employed in their administration and warfare were savages barely reclaimed from the most barbarous practices; and just as, in a far less degree, the Matebele police of the British South Africa Company were guilty of malpractices that the Company would never knowingly have allowed to be perpetrated, so the negro soldiers of the Congo State committed appalling outrages before their officers could become cognizant of their intended actions and prevent them. But nothing can be said in excuse or mitigation of the behaviour of certain agents of privileged companies and even persons employed on the private domain of King Leopold, whose actions as recorded in undisputed evidence were almost those of devils.
In July 1885 the King-Sovereign of the Congo State issued a decree that all vacant land within the boundaries of the State were the “private property” (the Domaine privé) of the Government; the Government being then and for twenty-five years afterwards the despotic King-Sovereign. Little objection was raised to this measure at first, the general idea (very similar to announcements made then and later by other European Powers in their African possessions) being that King Leopold wished to protect the rights of the natives from being hurriedly and foolishly sold to private speculators in land, or concession-hunters. But in 1891 a “secret decree” was sent out from the King’s cabinet, reserving to the State all elephants and their ivory and all wild rubber and forest-produce on the “vacant lands” of the Domaine privé. The officers of the State were enjoined to organize the collection (as a form of taxes) of all the ivory and rubber procurable; and the natives of Congoland (except the small western strip near the Atlantic) were obliged to sell all their produce to the State only. By a later decree they were actually forbidden to leave their villages without a special permit. In short, so far as the King-Sovereign’s writ ran, the whole population of Belgian Congo—nearly a million square miles—was virtually enslaved, and this by the man who in 1876 stood up before Europe and announced that he was going to devote such of his time and money as he could spare from Belgium to the abolition of slavery in Central Africa and the raising of the Negro to a condition of freedom and enlightenment.
In 1896 another “secret decree” created the Domaine de la Couronne, and carved out for King Leopold II an area of 112,000 square miles in the very heart of Congoland, between the Sankuru and the Busira rivers. This region, amazingly rich in wild rubber, was to be privately administered by Leopold II without rendering any account to the State exchequer, and of course without laying its enormous revenues (wrung from the inhabitants by cruelties and stress scarcely surpassed by the recently-revealed horrors of the Putumayo) under any contribution towards the annual expenses of public administration in the Congo State. In addition, the whole rest of the Domaine privé (except always the exhausted strip along the Congo banks between Stanley Pool and the sea) was divided up into regions strictly reserved for a State monopoly of products, and others which were farmed out to concessionaire companies, in which either the State, or King Leopold, or both, were partners in profits. To these concessionaire companies were at first given almost unlimited powers over the natives, from which resulted the frightful abuses that shocked the conscience of Europe and Anglo-Saxon America. One foreign trading-house which might have protested was squared by being given part of the plunder; most other old-established trading houses on the Lower River were prevented from trading inland; influential Englishmen (not forgetting several connected with the press) were admitted to this profit-taking; and for some twelve years these truly iniquitous proceedings were ignored, in spite of the missionary protests which began in 1898, and of Mr Fox-Bourne’s trenchant attack[189] on King Leopold’s policy published in 1903—ignored, that is to say, by the governments of the States which had taken part in the Berlin Conference of 1884. Statesmen of probity found it impossible at first to believe that Leopold II, King of the Belgians, grandson of Louis Philippe, cousin of Queen Victoria, husband of an Austrian Archduchess, a devoted upholder of the Roman Church, and a very rich man, could for a moment lend himself to a policy at once infamous, flagrantly unjust, exceedingly cruel, and incredibly mean[190]. The gallant actions of many a Belgian pioneer on Tanganyika and on the Lualaba—even on the fringe of that Egyptian Sudan which Great Britain then lacked the resolution to enter—were pointed to. The great record of Storms was unearthed from missionary records, and public opinion was asked “Is it possible that the man who sent out such officers as these, who quenched the slave traffic which Livingstone abhorred but was powerless to arrest, who brought relief from Dervish tyranny to the harassed natives of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, could wish to enrich himself, and himself alone, with the produce of all Congoland, could tolerate the collection of rubber or the obtaining of ivory by methods of compulsion only to be parallelled in the worst records of Spain in the New World?” Yet it was true. Side by side with this devastation of the Congo basin—a devastation which has left Arab slave-raids far, far behind, which has reduced the native population in fifteen years (sleeping sickness aiding) from an approximate twenty millions to a bare nine millions—a work of civilization as good in its way as anything that Britain or France has done in Uganda or Nigeria was going on. Wherever Belgian officers could get a free hand, and were not the mere agents of this singularly heartless man, they built up native communities anew, and were even loved and honoured by the natives. It was not the Belgian nation, so much, that was to blame, or Belgian men who failed in those great administrative qualities which are possessed by so many other European nations; it was the system imposed on them by a being born out of due time, a personality that had stepped unaltered from the 16th century into the 19th. Yet, to be just, this conception of “African colonization” was not peculiar to Leopold II. It was the ideal of some English minds and was still more the vogue with a certain type of French Colonial administrator or minister. As we have seen, French Congo had a history very like that of the Belgian Congo.
King Leopold preserved himself long from attack and warded off many a blow from the British Parliament by pointing to British companies and British monopolies in Africa. And we had—it seems—no statesman sufficiently adroit to indicate to him the cardinal difference. In none of her permanent arrangements and at no time even in theory did Great Britain tolerate in her African dominions or spheres of influence monopolies which limited the trade of the country to one or more privileged organizations, or which obliged the natives to confine their commerce to any particular firm or individual trader. Great Britain did acknowledge (usually where it was impossible to do otherwise) that certain pioneer companies or persons held by purchase under fair conditions large areas of land in “new” Africa; but the natives’ rights to the land they occupied and used were respected, provision was always made for their expansion, and in most cases the whole of the vacant land was vested in the British Government. But not on lines parallel to those which were followed by Leopold II, not with the result of enriching the private revenues of Queen Victoria or King Edward, or of endowing Margate with a bandstand, Bournemouth with an opera house, or London with a new museum. The British Government has regarded itself as holding the vacant lands in trust for the infant state and for all its future inhabitants, without distinction of colour, except it be that a more liberal treatment is to be shown to black than white. All the revenues derived from the state lands in British Africa are accounted for annually and are applied to the service and for the benefit of the country from which they are derived. Therein lies the radical difference between the spoliations of King Leopold (or of the old Spanish Colonial Empire) and the policy of Great Britain and most other modern European powers in Asia and Africa. It may or may not be a good thing that one half of the land in Uganda or in Nigeria is the property of the State, a state mainly administered at present by Europeans. But at any rate all the revenue derived from the land can be ascertained by any native sufficiently educated to read annual reports; and all this revenue is spent—usually with the knowledge and advice of native counsellors—on Nigeria or Uganda, as the case may be, and not on any other land. King Leopold, it is true, while he took unto himself all the revenues, direct and indirect, derived from the Congo State, had, prior to 1890, supported out of his privy purse the cost of creating and maintaining the Congo State (a total amount about £500,000 in value) and probably spent in addition up till 1901 another £400,000. But even after allowing him interest at 4 per cent, (in theory) on this outlay of £900,000 and adding to that a theoretical Civil List at £20,000 a year as King-Sovereign, he was still owing the Congo State an amount understated at £4,000,000, when that State was annexed by Belgium in 1909. That is to say, he profited by his intervention in Congo affairs at least to that amount, and probably to an extent much greater. And his great riches were obtained at a cruel cost in human lives and human misery.
I desire to present all aspects of this astounding episode in the history of the colonization of Africa. Therefore I would state that King Leopold employed a small percentage of the profits above computed—say £100,000—in promoting the scientific investigation of his territories and subject peoples, with the result that our knowledge of the fauna, flora, meteorology and above all ethnology of the Congo basin were immensely increased. Also, however unfair in regard to solemn treaty stipulations were his concessions and his monopolies, these did much to enrich Belgium and Antwerp in particular. It can well be imagined that, when so many of the king’s subjects were raking in large and small fortunes out of Congo rubber, ivory, and palm oil, when churches were rising from Congo donations, museums were endowed, kiosques and public gardens were being presented to Belgian towns from out of the fringe of this profit-taking, Belgians (very ignorant as a rule about Africa or Colonial policy or subjects outside Belgian life) should have been enthusiastic about their monarch, his “slimness,” and his Congo milch-cow. And notable English potentates in shipping and finance were partners with King Leopold, whose press department further stifled criticism in the journals of America, France, and Germany. Few stories therefore are at once more romantic—and will seem more incredible to posterity—than that which relates how this Goliath was overcome by a David in the person of a poor shipping clerk in the office of a Liverpool shipping firm which was amongst the partners of King Leopold.
This shipping clerk—E. D. Morel—was sent over to Antwerp, and Belgium generally, because he could speak French, and could therefore arrange all the minutiae of steamer fares and passenger accommodation, and the scales of freights for goods and produce, with the Congo State officials. In the course of his work he became acquainted with some of the grisly facts of Congo maladministration. He drew his employers’ attention to these stories and their verification. The result was his dismissal.
Almost penniless, he set to work with pen and paper to enlighten the world through the British press and British publishers on the state of affairs on the Congo. From African merchants, not quite so callous as his late employers, he received support, which also came slowly and at first grudgingly from the public. He succeeded in interesting the Government of the day; for his charges were amply borne out by the British consuls sent to Congoland to report (the best-known of whom was Sir Roger Casement). Morel had to face the insults and even the personal assaults of paid opponents at his meetings, and the calumnies of King Leopold’s subsidized press; but he roused public opinion in Britain, Belgium, the United States, Switzerland, France and Germany. The first notice Goliath took of David was—very reluctantly—to appoint a Commission of enquiry consisting of a Belgian, an Italian, and a Swiss jurist of distinction and honesty. Their report, though its publication was only partial, was a virtual admission of the truth of the allegations made by Morel and the British consuls and missionaries. King Leopold, in fact, had no defence to offer; and although, exerting his powers as King, as the relation of Kings and Emperors, as a rich man, to the utmost, he managed to prolong discussions and negotiations as long as possible, the end was inevitable. The Congo was taken from him and was annexed by Belgium on November 14, 1908. On December 17, 1909, King Leopold died. Stanley, “Bula Matadi,” the real creator of the Congo State, had predeceased him by five years, dying in 1904, the last few years of his life saddened by the disheartening conviction that the immediate effect of his life’s work had been a sordid scandal and the most monstrous piece of hypocrisy ever perpetrated by Europe in Africa[191].
Leopold II found many champions in England and the United States, even among men and women travellers of good repute, incapable of being bribed or cajoled. But the explanation of this seeming anomaly, in contrast to the withering denunciations of Morel, of British, American, Swedish, and Belgian missionaries and publicists, lies in the fact that these apologists or eulogists of the King or of his Belgian officers never entered the vast Domaine de la Couronne (a territory larger in area than the United Kingdom) or penetrated far into the jealously-closed concessions of the Belgian companies; and also from the strange ignorance many of such travellers showed in the elementary ethics of native rights. They saw—as the present writer did—order taking the place of disorder, improved cultivation, handsome buildings, Arab slavery at an end, education spreading among and through the native soldiery, and many other beneficent signs of civilization, and they never examined into what was going on away from the stereotyped travel routes. Or if they were of the Emil Torday class of scientific explorer, they penetrated at great risk into remote parts of south-west, north, and north-east Congoland wherein the native tribes were too powerful to be enslaved and constrained to gather rubber or to confine their trade to the King’s agents and concessionaires. Fortunately such districts escaped the Leopoldian ravages and are now ripe for a well-ordered civilization to be imparted to their peoples through Belgian agency.
Any historian who omitted to dwell on the devoted and usually poorly paid work of many a Belgian officer and civilian in Congoland amongst quarrelsome or cruel native tribes, the achievements for the good of the natives of many a Belgian engineer, doctor, planter, road-maker, stockman, and schoolmaster, would indeed be unjust. The destruction of Arab tyranny will always remain a feat of extraordinary courage and of lasting good to Central Africa; and fortunately it was not in the regions rescued from Arab sway that the wrong-doing of the King and his concessionaires took place. The Arab-conquered portions of the Congo basin have never gone back in prosperity and well-being of the natives since they became Belgian provinces; and much the same might be said about Katanga, which under its usurping Wa-nyamwezi chiefs had been soaked in blood. But the Congo basin is still governed by Belgium under a régime which fails to conform precisely to the conditions laid down by the Act of Berlin or to satisfy those who desire justice of treatment for native races leading a settled agricultural life.
The present King of the Belgians (Albert I) visited the Congo territories in 1907, traversed Congoland from Katanga to the mouth of the Congo, and resolved that his policy as King-Sovereign should be on lines radically different from those of his predecessor. Already a current of free trade is permeating the dominion and bringing with it freedom in other directions. The greater native chiefs are now encouraged to work with the Belgian Government and to look after the immediate interests of their own subjects. Railways have been rapidly pushed forward in eastern Congoland, which will some day link up Northern Rhodesia with Uganda, with the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the French Sudan.
There should be a great future, commercially at any rate, before the Belgian Congo, which in wealth of vegetable and mineral products and length of navigable waterways resembles Brazil and Guiana; and, theoretically, there should be no reason why Flemings and Walloons as guardians of this rich Central African state should not play as great a rôle in the Dark Continent as they have done in the industrial and artistic history of Europe. Yet little Belgium has a tremendous task before her in raising this immense territory to the condition of Brazil or Java; and the regret naturally felt by English, German, and French writers that this wealthy territory was more or less disdained by their Governments in the days of Cameron’s and Stanley’s earlier journeys and advertisements of its capabilities, no doubt stimulates on their part a destructive criticism of Belgian efforts and capabilities. It is sometimes hinted that this unwieldy state will not long outlive as a political entity the monarch who founded it, and that its southern provinces will fall to England, its northern to France, and its western to Germany. But predictions in regard to the evolution of African history are very uncertain of fulfilment, and the Congo State may yet become and remain a Belgian India.