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: