Only one missionary at that date had entered this dark land, and his exclamation was: “The Bulgarian atrocities are child’s play to what has taken place here.”
Father Vermeersch then proceeds to deal with the Congo balance-sheets. His criticism is most destructive. He shows at considerable length, and with a fine grasp of his subject, that there is really no connection at all between the so-called estimate and the actual budget. In the course of the State’s development there is an excess running to millions of pounds which has never been accounted for. In this Father Vermeersch is in agreement with the equally elaborate calculations of Professor Cattier, of Brussels.
He puts the economical case in a nutshell thus:
“X——, District Commissioner, commits every day dozens of offences against individual liberty. What can be done? These violations of the law are necessitated by a great enterprise which must have workmen. In such cases the intervention of the magistrate would be a ruinous imprudence, calculated to bring trouble into the region.”
“But the law?”
“Oh, law in the Congo is not applicable!”
“But if you offered a decent remuneration, would you not get free labour?”
“That is precisely what the State will not listen to. It maintains that the enterprise must be carried out for nothing!”
And disposes once again of the “forty hours a month” fiction:
“It is impossible for the State to obtain the amount of rubber it sells annually, by labour limited to forty hours a month, especially when it is borne in mind that a number of these hours are absorbed in other corvées. Of two things one, therefore. Either the surplus is furnished freely; and if so, how can coercion be logically argued? Or this supplementary labour is forced; and if so, the law of forty hours is shown to be merely a fraud.”