The tale is told—the tale of “King Leopold’s rule in Africa.” A piratical expedition on a scale incredibly colossal. The perfection of its hypocrisy; the depth of its low cunning; its pitiable intrigues; the illimitableness of its egotism; its moral hideousness; the vastness and madness of its crimes—the heart sickens and the mind rebels at the thought of them. A perpetual nightmare reeking with vapours of vile ambitions—cynical, fantastic, appalling. A tragedy which appears unreal, so unutterably ghastly its concomitants, but the grimness of whose reality is incapable of superlative treatment. Destroying, decimating, degrading, its poisonous breath sweeps through the forests of the Congo. Men fall beneath it as grass beneath the scythe, by slaughter, famine, torture, sickness, and misery. Women and children flee from it, but not fast enough, though the mother destroy the unborn life within her that her feet may drag less heavily through the bush.
There has been nothing quite comparable with it since the world was made. The world can never see its like again.
Sufficient that it exists, that each month, each year, the terror of this Oppression grows, immolating fresh victims, demanding new offerings to minister to its lusts, spreading in ever wider circles the area of its abominations.
After that, what can one say or do except to appreciate one’s sense of humour, and the lack of it in a zealot? A tower of babel on a pile of words!
FOOTNOTES:
[48] E. D. Morel.
[49] In a speech delivered by Mr. Rhodes, in which he outlined his scheme for linking Egypt with the Cape, he said that his measures, if adopted, “will give to England Africa, the whole of it.” (Boulger, p. 373.)
[50] See Appendix.
[51] See Appendix.