FOOTNOTES:
[44] The following letter, addressed to the Secretary of the Congo Reform Association, Liverpool, on December 8, 1904, by the editor of the Catholic Herald (London), indicates that certain British journals are sincerely seeking to expose the truth concerning the Congo and the motives underlying the campaign against the Free State in England. The writer of the letter is the publisher of the thirty-odd leading Catholic papers in the United Kingdom. As a Member of Parliament, and as an editor, his attitude towards public questions has always been conscientious and fearless.
“Sir,—The following matters so intimately concern your veracity, and, therefore, deeply concern the public, in connection with your anti-Congo campaign and your Congo Reform Society, that I draw your attention to the fact that this letter will be printed in full in the Catholic Herald of next week, and will also be sent out broadcast to the newspapers of this country, so that you may have a full opportunity of defending yourself from the most serious charges made therein.
“On the 24th of November last, in defending an abusive attack made by the London Daily News on the Belgian people, in which it referred to them as ‘barbarians,’ you made a statement to the effect that fifteen Congo officials were then in prison at Boma for the grossest outrages upon natives, and that ten more were awaiting their trial.
“In reply to a communication sent to a member of the Belgian House of Representatives, a statement is made by the Belgian authorities, that only two officials are in prison in Boma. This statement was forwarded to the Daily News, which has lent itself to the disgraceful and lying campaign against the Congo, but, although the editor has been several times requested to publish it, he has up till now declined to do so.
“I, therefore, draw your attention to this emphatic contradiction of your story, and, having every confidence in the honesty and truthfulness of the statement made by responsible gentlemen in Brussels, state that your assertion can only be treated as a gross invention, quite on a par with the other methods of your anti-Congo campaign.
“But this is not the most serious matter. On the following point, I charge you with putting forward a statement in the Daily News, with reference to the Congo Reform Society, which you knew to be untrue, for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the public of this country. It was stated in a letter which appeared in the Daily News on November 25th, that Liverpool shippers and merchants were aiding the Congo Reform Society, and financing it. On the 29th November a letter appeared from you in the Daily News, in which you denied this, and called upon the writer to offer an apology for his statement. You proceeded to assert that you had enclosed (for the private information of the Editor of the Daily News) a list of the subscribers to the Congo Reform Society, and the editor supported your statement by the assertion that ‘the list of donors and subscribers supplied does not contain the names of any British merchants or shippers.’
“The clear purport of your letter was to make it out that there was no co-operation between the Liverpool shippers and merchants and this so-called Reform Society, which is nothing more or less than a bogus name adopted to cover the campaign of falsehood and calumny which you and your friends have entered upon.
“On November 30th the following statement was published in the Daily News in answer to your denial:—‘With reference to the Liverpool merchants I have not seen the “private list” that he (Mr. Morel) forwards to you. I cannot tell whether it contains the names of all the subscribers to the Congo Reform Society, but I cannot accept the denial of the secretary with reference to the Liverpool merchants, in view of the candid admission of Mr. Fox Bourne that some of the merchants in Liverpool are working with the Society, and his further admission that they had helped to finance it. I believe Mr. Fox Bourne’s statement, and if an apology is required for perversion of the facts, the secretary of the Congo Reform Society must make that apology.’
“To that emphatic disproval of your statement, you have up till now made no reply. In fact you cannot deny Mr. Fox Bourne’s honest admission, which has already appeared in our columns, and of which evidently you were entirely ignorant at the time you attempted to throw dust into the eyes of the readers of the Daily News by your untruthful denial.
“Now, one of two things: either you are in a position to free yourself from this charge of deception and untruthful statement put forward for the purpose of deceiving the public, or you are not. If you are in a position to do so, come forward immediately, in the interests of the Congo Reform Society, and of yourself as its secretary. If you are not in a position to disprove this statement and to substantiate your words, you stand convicted of flagrant deception and falsehood on a most important public matter, and the people of this country will know how to judge a person, or a society, which descends to such methods for the purpose of bolstering up selfish and disgraceful designs.
“At the very moment that you were writing this denial in the columns of the Daily News, you were in treaty with a former Congo official, and bribing him for the purpose of giving evidence against the Congo State, and as a witness to the document that passed between you, you called in Mr. John Holt, merchant, 81, Dale Street, Liverpool, who was associated with you in this attempt to purchase testimony, and who actually paid, at the Exchange Hotel, Liverpool, on the 21st November last, a sum of £40 to Mr. Benedetti, the Congo ex-official referred to, and yet you have the impudence and the hardihood to assert that the Liverpool shippers and Liverpool merchants are not associated with the Congo Reform Society!
“Nor are these all the inventions, perversions, and misrepresentations which can be proved against you in connection with this movement.
“The book that you have just written and published is packed with such lies and suppressions of truth. You print a travesty of the case of the man Stokes, who was executed in the Congo, and you say that the charge against him was ‘of trading with natives,’ whereas, as a matter of fact, he was proved to have supplied the cruel and barbarous Arab slave raiders of the Congo, who have been put down by the Congo Government, with guns and ammunition for the purpose of carrying on their nefarious work.
“These slave raiders evidently receive your warm sympathy, and the man Stokes, who helped them to carry on their trade, is held up by you as a martyr! Yet you dare to appear before the people of this country as a friend of the natives of the Congo, and your present campaign is ostensibly carried on for the amelioration of their condition!
“Again, you have ventured to make a most infamous charge against Catholic missionaries in the Congo. In a letter to the Times you said that ‘they dared not state in public what they have said in private.’ In other words, you accuse them of double dealing of the basest character, like Mr. Fox Bourne, who says, ‘they offer religion to the natives only as a bribe, or to terrorise them into further enslavement.’
“You have never produced a single iota of evidence in support of this statement against the Catholic missionaries, who are doing such splendid work in the Congo territory. We characterise the statement as a gross and palpable invention, but, in that respect, it has only been on a par with the general policy of yourself and the so-called ‘Congo Reform Society’ in connection with these matters. “It has also been asserted by the secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Society—which has been mainly responsible, with yourself and the Liverpool shippers and merchants, for working up this campaign of calumny—that the clerical party in Belgium is supporting the King in his Congo policy, irrespective of any atrocities that may be committed, because the King has agreed to support them in Belgium. This is not only a libel on Belgian Catholics and the Belgian people—who have been insolently referred to by the Daily News as ‘barbarians’—but is amply disproved by the fact that the most recent exposure of your tactics, and the tactics of your society, has been made in the columns of the well-known anti-clerical paper, The Independance Belge, of Brussels, which has published the disclosures with reference to your bribing of a Congo official to secure evidence from him, and has amply exposed, on many occasions, the selfish and dishonest character of this anti-Congo campaign.
“You have printed the grossest inventions with reference to the treatment of British natives in Congo territory. You have said that at Lagos, and in the surrounding district, if the word ‘Congo’ is mentioned to a native he will make for the bush if he is on land, and will jump into the water if he happens to be on sea, in order to escape going to the Congo!
“A full and impartial inquiry made by a number of English gentlemen at Lagos, and the evidence of one hundred and seventy-five natives taken on oath, shows how baseless and unscrupulous is your statement. One English gentleman declares that ‘in a single week’s time he would undertake to send two thousand natives to the Congo, if the English Government would permit their enrolment’—the taxation being so much heavier in British territory than in Congo territory, that natives have to seek in the latter the means of earning the taxation which they are compelled to pay to the British administration.
“Missionaries of all classes, Catholic and non-Catholic, have borne ample testimony to the humane and civilising influence of the Congo administration. Englishmen like Lord Mountmorres, Major Harrison, of Hull, Mr. Grenfell, Mr. Bell, Mr. Holland, Mr. Maguire, as also Mrs. French-Sheldon, Mrs. Doering, and others, have borne the most emphatic testimony to the lies and misrepresentations that have been so sedulously spread by yourself and your friends with reference to the Congo administration.
“You cannot have failed to notice that in La Vérité sur le Congo for October-November, 1904, page 3, you are accused of actually having faked certain photographs which appeared in your book—one on page 49, in which certain natives are represented holding cut-off hands. The publication referred to says that ‘the hands seem to have been added afterwards’; and, with regard to a photograph on page 225 of your book, the same publication says that ‘the chains around the necks of the natives would also appear to have been designed on the plate.’
“You have put these photographs forward as real. Will you produce the negatives and the name of the person who took the actual photographs? Or will you remain content to rest under the charge of fabricating evidence of this description to deceive your readers?
“The Catholic Herald denounces, and will denounce, outrages upon natives and wrongdoing and maladministration of native territories, whether by Belgians or by any other people. No doubt wrongdoing has taken place; but is it of such a character as justifies people in this country taking up arms against those responsible for it?
“Is it not rather inseparable from the administration of native territories? Let any one responsible for native administration answer this question, but let not the good cause of fair play and justice for the natives be disgraced and besmirched by the recklessness and viciousness that have been displayed in connection with this Congo agitation.
“The Catholic Herald accepts in full all responsibility for the statements made herein, and for the publication of them, and for their circulation broadcast through the Press of this country, and believes that in doing so it is discharging a public duty, not only to the Catholic name, which you have foully libelled, but also to the cause of international peace and goodwill, which this anti-Congo campaign, based on selfish and sordid motives, has done so much to impair.
“The administration of the Congo will compare more than favourably with the administration of native territories under British rule. There is more consideration shown to the natives, more care evinced for their interests, and they are less heavily taxed, and more humanely treated in the Congo, than is the case in any British territory in Africa to-day.
“Some of the lies sent forth on the wings of the Press are hereby nailed to the counter, and it is to be hoped that yourself, or your Society, will at once disprove, by any means at your disposal, charges which, if not so disproved, clearly show that your evidence in connection with these matters is discredited and untrustworthy, and that no one will be justified in paying attention to any statement of yours, unless supported by evidence that has not been purchased or invented.
“The Editor,
“The Catholic Herald.”
[45] From The Transvaal Trouble, an Extract from the Biography of the late Sir Bartle Frere, by John Martineau (pp. 211, 212):
“During these years, about 1879, a society in London, called the Aborigines’ Protection Society, took upon itself the function of judging between the white and the black races in South Africa, and of arraigning the conduct of the white race whenever there was a question between the two. That a society in London, with paid officers bound to justify their employment by finding something to complain of, should take upon itself to pronounce judgment upon difficult and complex questions between races in South Africa was, on the face of it, not more reasonable than that a society should be started at Cape Town, say, to protect women and children in London. By its constitution, which was practically that of advocatus diaboli against the white man, such a society must always of necessity take a one-sided view, from which misapprehension and mischief could hardly fail to result, however carefully considered were the methods employed.
“The methods employed by the Aborigines’ Protection Society bore some resemblance to those of mediæval Venice. The Blue-books of the time are full of letters from the society to the Secretary of State, detailing stories of alleged oppression or cruelty, and demanding an inquiry; or sometimes a question was asked to the same effect in Parliament. It would be many months before the reply to the inquiry could come back from the Cape, and, in the meantime, the story was circulated, and the refutation came too late to be listened to. The society generally refused to give the name of its informant, or the particulars of time and place, so that, like the lion’s mouth at Venice, it offered an opportunity to any one—agitator, place-hunter, or criminal having a spite against a magistrate or official—to injure him anonymously.... The fear of being denounced by some scoundrel to the society in some districts seriously interfered with and often perverted the administration of justice.... In one instance, a man, on whose testimony is placed special reliance, was discovered to be a disfrocked clergyman who had been in custody for swindling another informant, who in turn was a trader who had been in jail for gun-running.
“Mr. H. Nixon, writing to Sir Bartle Frere, says:
“‘The lawlessness of the coloured races and their hopeless state of degradation, their drunkenness, and general dissolute habits may fairly be laid to the baneful influence of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, which has done everything it possibly could to paralyse the arm of the law in the execution of justice, and I consider the demoralisation of the natives is entirely due to their persistent agitation. The drunkenness in this province is quite alarming and unprecedented.’”
CHAPTER XXXI
THE CONGO CAMPAIGN IN AMERICA
The interest taken by Americans in the affairs of the Congo Free State has never been very keen. What little of interest, however, we do take in that distant region has been sentimental, for the greater part based upon the national respect for Stanley and his work. The campaign in England against the Congo, therefore, fails to evoke any substantial sympathy on this side of the Atlantic. Citizens of the United States are better employed than in undertaking knight-errantry at the behest of certain disappointed British merchants and fanatics.
American Aid Wanted.
But, inasmuch as it is vital to the enemies of the Congo Free State that our country should be with them in their crusade, the Rev. Mr. W. M. Morrison, of Lexington, Virginia, a gentleman whose Christianity is liberally leavened with business acumen, was brought to the front and set upon a pedestal. The light of publicity was turned upon the reverend gentleman, who then proceeded to relate stories of outrage and oppression, examples of which he had seen and heard—chiefly heard—during six years’ residence in the Congo Free State as a missionary of the American Presbyterians.
Mr. Morrison’s stories are of the stock variety, and include looted villages, wholesale deportations, mutilations, burnings, State slavery, and refusal of land concessions to missionaries—in brief, the whole catalogue of infamies without which, real or alleged, men such as Mr. Fox Bourne, the Secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Society in England, and Mr. Morel, who built the Congo Reform Association around himself, would find their occupation gone. The italics are mine. Why I have used them will at once appear.
A Morrisonian Jeremiad.
“Concessions or grants of land, however small,” wails Mr. Morrison, “can now no longer be obtained from the State by other than favoured individuals or corporations... Not only are concessions refused to traders, they are also refused to missionaries.” Alas! yes, in the case of a missionary who demands, as Mr. Morrison did, “that no taxes shall be levied, and no soldiers drawn from certain populations around Luebo.”[46]
The refusal of Mr. Morrison’s demand for the creation of an Alsatia which should be equally attractive to the idle and the thrifty, from which the State was to receive no support, and which, in the circumstances, would certainly at once become the most populous district in all the Congo Free State, seems to have angered the reverend gentleman, for thereafter followed his discovery of atrocities committed by State officials against natives. Land was offered to Mr. Morrison upon equitable terms, identical with those agreed upon between the State and numerous other missions.
A Belated Discovery.
When Mr. Morrison was in Brussels in the spring of 1903, negotiating with the Congo Government concerning the concession of land, and in constant touch with officials of that Government, he said not one word about any atrocities which he had seen or heard of in Congoland; but a few weeks later, he was in London, associating with the English Congophobes, and calling upon the Government of the United States to combine with that of Great Britain to coerce the Congo Government, though in what manner and to what effect is not quite clear. What, however, is perfectly clear, is the bad faith of the men who make it their business to vilify and misrepresent the Congo Administration. For example, here is Mr. Morrison’s statement about the almost impossibility of obtaining concessions of land for missions, when up to May, 1903, there had been fifteen grants of land conceded in the Congo State to the American Baptist Missionary Union; two to the American Congo Mission; fifteen to the British Baptist Society Corporation; seven to the Bishop Taylor’s Self-Supporting Mission; seven to the Congo Balolo Mission; eleven to the International Missionary Alliance; nine to the Swedish Missionary Society, and forty-four to the Roman Catholic Mission.
Few Facts in Many Words.
The campaign against the Congo in this country was opened on the 19th of April, 1904, by the presentation to Congress of a huge inflated memorial, accompanied by numerous substantiating documents of great length. It was gotten up by the Rev. Thomas S. Barbour, Chairman of the Conference of Missionary Societies and Secretary of the American Baptist Missionary Union, Boston, with the assistance of the Rev. W. M. Morrison and six other gentlemen interested in missionary work. Senator Morgan, of Alabama, undertook the work of presentation, and performed his task with as much moderation and grace as its nature permitted. The memorial was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations and ordered to be printed.
Not Uncle Sam’s Affair.
On the whole, the reception of this strange literary budget—a rechauffé of oft-refuted fables and adroit distortions of events that occurred long ago—was decidedly passive. The prevailing impression among Senators seemed to be that even if all that is asserted in the memorial be true (a monstrous supposition which surely its promoters never seriously entertained), to play into the hands of John Bull’s merchants at the bidding of John Bull’s missionaries is hardly a suitable rôle for Uncle Sam.
A Mischievous Busybody.
The next move in the campaign against the Congo Free State in this country took place at Washington on the 30th of September, 1904, when the Secretary of the Congo Reform Association (an English organisation of which Mr. John Holt, the merchant-philanthropist, of Liverpool, is one of the pillars) presented a memorial to President Roosevelt concerning affairs in the Congo Free State, and asking for his intervention therein. The memorial was politely received, acknowledged with graceful platitudes, and laid aside. During the few weeks that the Congo Reform Association’s agitator was in this country, he talked freely to every newspaper reporter he met, and disseminated broadcast the old libels which had grown stale with use in England.
The Belgian People Speak.
When the Belgian people learned of the presentation to President Roosevelt of the second anti-Congo memorial, wherein the agents of the British merchants strove to make it appear that the United States ought to do what all the continental powers had, by their silence, refused to do when the British Foreign Secretary appealed to them in August, 1903, their leading citizens took a hand in the literary carnival and sent President Roosevelt their reply to the series of slanders which were being so widely disseminated in America by the Liverpool organisation. Although the anti-Congolese resolutions of the Boston Peace Conference were published in extenso in the secular and religious press throughout the United States, for some inscrutable reason the Belgian reply to the second Liverpool memorial sent to President Roosevelt on October 3, 1904, has so far never had the advantage of similar publicity. This fact alone would indicate that his Excellency, Baron Moncheur, Belgian Minister to the United States, and his talented coadjutor, Professor A. Nerincx, an eminent Belgian advocate, author, and instructor in the University of Louvain, were quite indifferent to that campaign of publicity which the enemies of the Congo Free State began in England and now continue in America. In justice, however, to the Federation for the Defence of Belgian Interests Abroad, a Belgian society numbering over fifty thousand adherents, it is deemed desirable to quote in full the only communication bearing upon the anti-Congolese campaign which the official of the Free State or the Belgian people have ever addressed to the people of the United States:
FÉDÉRATION POUR LE DEFENSE DES INTERETS BELGES A L’ÉTRANGER.
Brussels, October 3, 1904.
To His Excellency, Theodore Roosevelt,
President of the United States.
Mr. President:
The Federation for the Defence of Belgian Interests Abroad presents its compliments to the President of the United States and begs leave to state:
That we are loth to impose upon the President of the United States considerations which are foreign to the interests of his Government. But inasmuch as certain persons are conducting within the United States a movement to involve the Government of the United States in the consideration of their unfounded charges and interested misrepresentations against the Government of the Congo Free State, we feel it our duty to present a brief statement of the objects of the Congo Government to the President of a friendly Power in order that the unjust methods being employed by the enemies of the Congo Free State may not mislead the President to encourage Congressional action prejudicial to our interests before we shall have been fully heard.
Christian Child, New Antwerp (Bangala).
Fetich-Idol, Lower Congo.
Our Association has been formed for the defence of Belgian interests and possessions abroad. Our people esteem and admire the people of the United States and we have great respect for their President. The Belgians desire that they shall not be slandered and vilified in the midst of the American people. They feel it their duty to assist the American people to a proper understanding of the lofty purposes which actuate the Government of the Congo Free State. In this connection the Belgians recall with pleasure and with pride the fact that the Government of the United States was the first great nation to recognise the flag of the International Association of the Congo as that of an independent State. By its treaties and by its adherence to the Berlin and Brussels Acts it promised liberty of trade in its part of the Congo Basin, and it respectfully asserts that it has fulfilled that promise in spirit and to the letter in so far as the short term of its existence in a savage country has enabled it to establish an organisation which, by its prosperity and progress, now excites the envy of those who seek to disrupt it.
The principles which actuate the Congo Government are tersely set out in an essay written by a highly qualified American citizen, which is herewith enclosed. We humbly beg the President of the United States to honour us by perusing this concise exposition of the fundamental principles which underlie, and which have given such progressive momentum to, the Government of the Congo Free State.
The principles of the Congo Government are devoted to progress and civilisation. The State’s motto is “Work and Progress.” We have always felt that to intelligently follow that motto was to firmly establish in the midst of conditions of savagery the habit of industry and a respect for property as well as for life, according to the universal law of nations.
Concerning the term “Freedom of Commerce,” which Congo enemies are interpreting to mean ungoverned license, we beg to refer the President to the laws of the United States and penalties concerning trespass upon and pillage of public lands and their product. Perhaps no nation in the world has so precisely developed the law of private and public property, nor administered it with finer understanding of the principles of equity and justice, than the United States. The Congo law relating to property is in consonance with the law of the world’s greatest nations. The great success which has been attained by the Congo Government for the betterment of its native inhabitants by the operation of this law, and the order which exists thereunder, has excited the envy and the avarice of those whose ulterior motive is being cloaked in the garb of humanitarianism and questionable philanthropy. On the one hand it is charged that the Congo Government by its method seeks to enslave the native in order that he may serve it with his hands for the benefit of interests whose welfare he does not share. On the other hand, the libellers of the Congo wilfully utter not only the unfounded accusation but the inconsistent charge, that the Government cuts off the hand whose work it seeks to enslave. Concerning the untruthful character of the testimony in this respect which has been published against the Congo by the promoters of the so-called “Congo Reform Association” of Liverpool, we beg to refer your Excellency to the great mass of genuine and reliable evidence by Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, Italians, and Belgians in direct contradiction of the falsehoods which form the traffic of the Association, whose leading spirit has never been near the Congo nor the natives who form the pretext of his search for personal notoriety and aggrandisement.
We also call your Excellency’s attention to the fact that the Congo Government, when assailed by missionaries at all, is assailed by a few individual missionaries operating in conjunction with the Liverpool Association, whose object we shall in due course expose. The Congo Government has not been assailed by other missionaries at all. The Catholic missionaries are in reality all seeking the moral, spiritual, and intellectual betterment of the native races, while those of a material faith, who have sought from the Congo Government and been denied personal concessions of material value solely, are secretly working in directions entirely unconnected with the spiritual and moral welfare of the Congo population. In due time and in the proper place the Government of the Congo Free State will produce its testimony bearing upon this phase of the campaign begun in England, and now carried to the United States, against an undertaking which within twenty years has done more to promote civilisation than was ever before attempted in all the great continent of Africa.
We beg your Excellency to receive from the hands of our representative an abundance of carefully prepared matter upon this subject, and to command him in any further desires which you may wish to express. A cursory outline, limited to only a few phases of the questions which the enemies of the Congo so confusedly mince in their wild condemnation of a State justly founded and intelligently and humanely governed, is not of course intended as a sufficient statement of our case. It is merely intended to introduce your Excellency to the subject on which our representative, and the evidence and literature he will offer to you, may lead you to those wise and equitable conclusions which have always characterised the highest tribunals of the American people.
Your Excellency is too well versed in the science of government to be influenced by the statement that where individual acts are committed in violation of enacted penal law the Government should be primarily charged therewith. If such were the case, penal institutions for the incarceration of violators of police law would be no part of a nation’s structure.
It is not infrequent that the cable conveys to us intimation that in some sections of your own free and glorious country an inflamed mob seizes upon a black inhabitant and burns him at the stake. Our governmental experience has taught us that such acts would have been impossible if your Government had been advised in time to prevent them. And yet we know that your Government is the subject of harsh criticism by self-constituted associations formed in the same country whence come those who accuse the sincere governmental effort of the Congo Free State. The law of the Congo Free State is based upon the loftiest ideals of humane control of a vast territory and undeveloped interests, and every part of the State’s machinery is employed to ensure equal justice to all.
The “method of the State,” at which Congo accusers hurl their shafts, cannot be charged with responsibility for lawless acts in a vast territory of a million square miles where the Government of that State is vigilantly and earnestly seeking, by the extension of its organisation and police powers, to suppress and punish crime and redress wrong. If the subjects of one nation were compelled to submit to the opinion of its unfriendly neighbours as to the correctness of their habits and conduct, and obliged to submit themselves to the penalties that their neighbours would attach to the alleged misconduct, the subjects of one nation would inhabit the prisons of another.
We need hardly call the attention of your Government to the great and humane work which your Government is now so earnestly, and with so much sacrifice, furthering in the Philippine Islands, to meet with that broad and sympathetic view of the situation in all savage countries; which, if fairly and justly applied to the Congo Free State, would place us upon that plane where co-operation, not criticism, were the reward of our sacrificial work in the darkest part of Africa.
It has been the pleasure of our beloved King, Leopold II., Sovereign of the Congo Free State, to appoint a Commission, composed of eminent men, to undertake with the utmost freedom a judicial investigation upon all and singular the vague charges from time to time used by the promoters of the Congo Reform Association in prostituting certain public journals in England. Your Excellency may be assured of the utmost integrity of the gentlemen who compose this Commission, and that the Congo Government will afford them all the help in its power to place the truth before the eyes of the world.
In this connection Congo reformers pretend that the decisions of the Congo Courts indicate that the government is bad, when in fact these very decisions are, in our opinion, proof of unimpeachable good faith and judicial independence.
Concerning the Congo standing army of 14,000 natives, as to which some criticism is uttered by the same persons, we need only indicate that the State Government is so well respected in the Congo Basin that it is able to control its vast territory with only seven soldiers to every 625 square miles. We have no doubt that if the Congo governmental system had not included this meagre police force for the repression of tribal strife and the maintenance of order, its critics would have represented the Congo Government as unprepared to guarantee protection to persons and property, and as unable to maintain the integrity of its frontiers. The Congo army is recruited in conformity with the Belgian law of conscription, which is a restriction of the universal service in Continental Europe. When the Government enlisted a part of its army in a neighbouring colony it was requested to desist, the promises of England to permit such recruiting notwithstanding. Now the Congo army is characterised as barbarian! Doubtless the Congo Government would have no objection to recruit its army in China, as miners are recruited for the Transvaal. But would it thereby escape censure? We think not. Some things which are right and proper in a British colony become crimes when done in the Congo Free State.
It is the earnest desire of the Belgian people, and those who are interested in the welfare and progress of the native population of Mid-Africa, that the good-will and respect of the people of the United States and their President may continue, by their sympathy, to enliven the devotion, energy, and sacrifice which the builders of the Congo Free State are expending upon races which but a few years ago were in a state of the wildest savagery.
We are, Mr. President, with great respect,
Your obedient servants,
(Signed) A. Dufourny,
President of the Federation for the
Defence of Belgian Interests Abroad.
King Leopold Attacked.
At the Peace Congress held at Boston in October, 1904, to attend which was as much the reason of the visit to these shores of the Secretary of the Congo Reform Association as the presentation of a memorial to President Roosevelt, he recited his usual tirade against the Congo Government and the person of King Leopold with somewhat more than his customary unction; but his contentions were utterly demolished by the superior information and saner reasoning of his fellow-countryman, Mr. George Head, and by a letter which was read from Cardinal Gibbons (vide Chap. xxxiv), warmly defending the aims and achievements of the Belgians in Central Africa.
The net result of the Peace Conference to the Congophobes is to expose and appreciably weaken their conspiracy.
Conspiracy Fails.
There remains in our country a small section of the press obedient to the will of anti-Congolese campaigners and their merchant support, and the eloquent sophistries of Messrs. Morrison and Barbour. But these forces are surely inadequate to cause the Government of the United States to forget all of our political traditions, and to so abate our natural shrewdness, as to become a catspaw for an avaricious foreign commercial clique.