In the United States the Berlin Act has not met with the universal respect of competent legal authorities. It provided no means for its own enforcement, and left the national committees, which were to carry out certain of its provisions, without machinery and without that central authority essential to its life. It also appears that the national committees never acted. Each of the Powers, supreme within the border of its own African territory, pursued a course which it believed was best calculated to develop the resources and the civilisation of that region of the Congo Basin in which it ruled. Nevertheless, the General Act had delimited the territory comprised in the Conventional Basin of the Congo; defined the domain occupied therein respectively by Germany, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and the Free State; applied to the entire Congo Basin the principle of freedom of commerce and of navigation, and concerted the aims of all the Powers to the suppression of the iniquitous slave trade and the horrible practice of cannibalism. It did not deal specifically with questions of territorial sovereignty, nor with the internal public and private land system, nor, in fact, with any act or principle of the civil or military government of a State. It did, however, seek to restrict the duties upon the Congo and its affluents, and stipulated that upon these highways there should be open to all nations the freedom to trade and to navigate. As Baron Descamps aptly says in his essay on Government Civilisation in New Countries:
The broad-minded measures of the Berlin Conference did away with many of the existing anomalies. Doubtless, the general application of those measures to all colonies would have been a step in the right direction; but while their general adoption could have been justified on the same grounds as their special application to the Congo, the Conference would not have been able to accomplish such a gigantic reform of distributive equity. The Conference, however, did what it could in this direction. It felt that the impracticability of the complete scheme did not prevent its partial application; that it was not easy to reform the whole world at once, especially the colonial world; that the field of experience on which it could operate was large enough; and that, last but not least, the nature of the country, where the Government was as yet more or less insecure, was calculated to induce those concerned to make exceptional sacrifices.
Government Park, Boma, 1904.
The Conference therefore made the following regulations for the Congo Basin:
Art. 1. The trade of all nations shall enjoy complete freedom.
Art. 2. All flags, without distinction of nationality, shall have free access.
Art. 3, § 2. All differential dues on vessels as well as on merchandise are forbidden.
Art. 5. No Power which exercises or shall exercise sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions shall be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favour of any kind in matters of trade.
Freedom of Commerce Defined.