Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the déclassé, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows who sat in the cafés and walked the boulevards and ogled the women.
He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his assistance with two hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable, but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer whose momentary support has gone to pieces.
Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but the Congo Government.
Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten orange-peel picked up in the market-place; a man who has worn out his friends—and his clothes. A man without hope.
One would think for the work in hand they would choose the greatest blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence. Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that. It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.
Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new servitude.
This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he had to extract from the people round about.
Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by Secretary of State Van Estvelde.
The Bonus Proclamation.
According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his bonus would be.