THE LATE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY, K.G., PREMIER OF THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT
Look at the Congo State. Everything has not gone there as well as could be wished, but still a great domination is maintained. There are two sets of opinions; but what is undoubtedly true is that Belgium—a very much less powerful country than Great Britain—has been able to maintain the dominion of her King over a territory larger than the Sudan.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY
Lord Cranborne, now Marquess of Salisbury, declared, during the debate of 20th May, 1903, in the House of Commons, that “There was no doubt that the administration of the Congo Government had been marked by a very high degree of a certain kind of administrative development. There were steamers upon the river, hospitals had been established, and all the machinery of elaborate judicial and police systems had been set up.”
CHAPTER XXXV
TESTIMONY OF TRAVELLERS AND THINKERS
(Concluded)
Among the denunciators of the Congo Administration a prominent place must be assigned to
DR. H. GRATTAN GUINNESS
(English)
a part medical, part missionary, wholly illogical perverter of facts. The plunges made by this eccentric individual into the depths of human credulity would certainly receive no attention in this place but for the strange circumstance that some people have actually so far belied their intelligence as to accept them without investigation. Strange to relate, Mr. Booker Washington (a singular lapse of sagacity in a man so generally intelligent) is among those whose credulity has been abused by stories of strings of Negroes’ hands being set to dry in the sun, the said hands having been cut off from natives by wicked European officials of the Congo Administration as a punishment for failure to collect a sufficiency of rubber, etc.
In the course of a recent lecture in Scotland, Dr. Guinness said: “To our knowledge the natives never mutilated their victims by cutting off their hands. The wild Ngombe never practised the mutilation referred to. It was reserved for civilisation to introduce this certificate of death.”