The story of the Congo Free State

by Henry Wellington Wack

“Neither in the spirit of your Commission [it is there said] nor in the views of the Government, is there any purpose at this moment to go upon the banks of the Congo, or upon the neighbouring shores with military array, but simply to found scientific, hospitable, and commercial stations, without other military force than may be strictly necessary for the protection of the establishments successively created.”

Unfortunately, the appearance of a European national flag upon the banks of Stanley Pool raised the question whether the agent of an association which had not the political character of a State, could, by a cession of the actual Sovereign of the country, acquire and exercise the sovereignty of a territory situated outside of Europe. I say outside of Europe, because we do not seek to find the solution of such a problem, as affecting Africa or Asia, in the existing political condition of affairs in Europe, nor in the fixed regulations of European society, upon which that condition of things rests, but in the unwritten law of nations, which should regulate the relations between free peoples, no matter to what family they belong, nor what religion they profess. Yet the practice of Europe, while Christianity was seeking to accomplish the high mission of civilising the barbarous races on the northern and eastern frontiers, merits our attention, because of a certain analogy between the condition of those frontiers in the eleventh century, and the present condition of Equatorial Africa.

In order, therefore, to appreciate the action of the International African Association, and to fathom the question whether this action is without precedent in the action of European peoples, it will be profitable, in the first place, to study the archives of a period when Europe was not entirely Christian, and when Christianity made a propaganda among the native pagan tribes who at that time inhabited a part of the country which we now call Prussia. This study will bring to our knowledge the action of an international association which accomplished the civilisation of a country inhabited by people who might be called savages, and, at the same time, will furnish a refutation of the assertion put forth by certain publicists that States alone can exercise the rights of sovereignty.

M. de Laveleye, before cited, has made allusion to the Teutonic Order as an institution for the propagation of civilisation, which, in the Middle Ages, carried civilisation to the populations on the borders of the Baltic and cemented them to the rest of Europe. The action of this famous order in regard to the acquisition of the sovereignty of a barbarous country has an important analogy to the action of the International African Association.

Thus this order was originally a charitable association of Germans which the citizens of the free cities of Bremen and Lubeck instituted at the siege of St. Jean d’Acre, during the Fourth Crusade. Afterwards, this association constituted itself into an order of chivalry towards the end of the twelfth century, and, after the religious enthusiasm to which the Crusades had given birth had ceased to inflame the nations of Southern Europe, the order established itself at Culm, in the country which is now called Western Prussia, where Conrad, Duke of Massovie, of the Polish Dynasty of the Piasts, ceded to it a territory and assured to it the conquests it might make over the idolatrous Prussians. The order by gradual steps established its dominion with Christianity over the whole of Prussia. The city of Konigsberg, upon the Pregel, was built by it in 1255, and the city of Marienbourg, upon the Nougat, which became afterwards the capital of the order, dates its foundation back to the year 1276.[57]

Another order, that of the Chevalier’s Sword-Bearers (Ensiferri), was established in Livonia, where, finding itself too weak to sustain the attacks of the pagans, it ended by uniting itself to the Teutonic Order. This union rendered the Teutonic Order so powerful it was able to establish its authority over the whole of Prussia, Courland, and Senegal, and from the annalists of that time we learn that in converting the people to Christianity the Teutonic Order subjected them to an exceedingly hard yoke. The Teutonic Order maintained itself in the sovereignty of this country until the middle of the fifteenth century, when it was subjected to great territorial losses in a war against Poland, and was compelled to become the vassal of the King of Poland for East Prussia. It is upon the embers of this order that the Prussian monarchy was established by the courage of the descendants of Duke Albert of Brandenbourg, grand master of the order, the first Duke of Prussia.

It is to be observed that, during all this time that this order was sovereign, it was not recognised as a State, and that the master of Livonia was not admitted to a sitting and vote among the States of the German Empire until after this order had ceased to be sovereign.

The City of Dantzic was, for two centuries, up to 1454, the maritime capital of the order, and it may be said that the Teutonic Order was the supreme power during two centuries on the shores of the Eastern Baltic, without being organised as a State.[58]

On the other hand, in the south of Europe, there was an order of chivalry whose services to civilisation in defending Christian countries against the invasions of the Arabs and the Turks are more famous even than those of the Teutonic Order. I refer to the sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem. This order, originally founded for the service of the hospital of St. John at Jerusalem, quitted the holy city at the commencement of the fourteenth century and established itself in the island of Rhodes to defend the frontiers of Christianity against the attacks of the Saracens. Then it had to give up the island of Rhodes to the Turks, and it established itself in the island of Malta, of which it obtained the territorial sovereignty as a gift from the Emperor, Charles V., in 1530. Even this order adopted a territorial title, that of the Order of Chevaliers of Malta, and maintained its sovereignty over this island until the year 1798. The English having soon after become masters of the island by conquest from the French, it was proposed by the Congress of Amiens, the 27th March, 1802, to restore the fortress of Malta to the Order of St. John, and to put the independence of the island under the guarantee of the powers uniting in that congress. This project failed. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, the Order of Malta demanded to be provided with another sovereign establishment in the Mediterranean suitable for the institution of the order, and that its independence and neutrality should be guaranteed by all the powers. The congress would not listen to this demand.

I have cited these two examples to show that according to the law of usage of Europe, associations which are not organised as states can, nevertheless, exercise sovereign rights. But it may be said that these orders of chivalry were privileged orders, and that they belong to an epoch when Christian civilisation was propagated at the sword’s point. Putting aside, then, the military epoch of the civilising propaganda, let us pass to the commercial era inaugurated by the discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama. The theory of publicists which we have to examine is this, that a private association cannot exercise sovereign rights in a barbarous country. A learned collaborateur of the Revue de géographie, of Paris, has formulated it in these terms: “It is a principle of law that states alone can exercise sovereign rights; that no private company can have them.”[59] It is evident that this proposition is affirmed by M. Delavand in too absolute a manner, for the facts of history contradict it. Among the members who formed the great Union of the United States of North America there were at least four which owed their origin to private associations, whose territorial sovereignty had been established before they received any charter of incorporation from the Crown of England. Everybody knows that a commercial company acquired by treaties with the natives the sovereignty of the English Indies. A similar Dutch company acquired and exercised sovereign rights in the island of Java and in the Malaccas. Should there be a different rule in Africa from that which has prevailed in America and Asia? Or should there be, for the young republics of the nineteenth century, a law of nations directly opposed to that which prevailed at the foundation of the independent States on the shores of North America—States whose federation gave birth to the parent republic of our age? I do not think so. Doubtless the national law of a country may prohibit its citizens from accepting the sovereignty of a barbarous country, but the international question must not be confounded with the question of national law, in regard to which we may say, “Extra territorium jus dicenti impune non paretur.”