The second chapter referred, amongst other things, to caravan routes, the transport of slaves by land, and to providing means of livelihood and education for liberated slaves. The sixth chapter enumerated the measures to be taken to restrict the trade in spirituous liquors. The six articles composing this chapter forbid the importation of distilled drinks “in the regions where they have not yet penetrated,” and “each Power will determine for itself the limit of this zone within its own possessions.” It is in reference to these infirm clauses, as elastic as Congo rubber, that the Free State has fulfilled promise with performance that puts her neighbours to shame. Each year of Belgian rule in the Congo has been marked by a contraction of the area in which alcoholic liquors are legitimate traffic even in a restricted form. To-day spirituous liquors are practically excluded from more than four-fifths of the entire State. The Sovereign of the Congo Free State does not respect that colonising enthusiasm which is founded on deleterious Scotch whiskey, Holland gin, and Jamaica rum. He has, therefore, carried out the spirit as well as the letter of the liquor clauses in the Brussels Act, and lost revenue for the State from a source which, to a large degree, supports the budgets of neighbouring colonies.
A Street in Coquilhatville, 1896 (Equateur).
In the eighth article it is declared that
the experience of all nations who have intercourse with Africa has shown the pernicious and preponderating part played by firearms in slave trade operations as well as in intertribal wars, and has clearly proved that the preservation of the African populations is a radical impossibility unless restrictive measures against the trade in firearms and ammunition are established.
It was, therefore, stipulated that in those parts of Africa between the twentieth parallel of north latitude and the twenty-second parallel of south latitude the importation of firearms, and especially of rifles and weapons of precision, powder, balls, and cartridges, should be greatly restricted, and as far as possible prohibited. The only exceptions in later articles to this prescription were made in favour of “measures directly by governments for arming of a force publique and the organisation of their defence.”
Attitude of the Powers.
To carry out the onerous duties imposed by the Brussels Act upon all the interested Powers required more than a Conference and its lofty ideals and appropriate resolutions. By the Berlin Act import duties had been prohibited in the Congo Basin only as an experiment. The attitude of the Powers towards this question was now more enlightened and more reasonable. Experience, and admiration for King Leopold’s rapid achievements in the development of the new State, combined, in the face of the slave-raiding enemy, to predispose the representatives of the Powers to a rational view of the practical necessities of governments which were called upon to establish order and a civil community upon the trail of the murderous slave-chaser.
Import Duties.
At the thirteenth session of the Conference, held on May 10, 1890, it was proposed that the stipulation of the Berlin Conference prohibiting all import duties for twenty years should be withdrawn, and that the “assenting Powers having possessions or protectorates in the Conventional Basin of the Congo shall be at liberty, so far as authority to this end is required, to establish duties on imported goods, the scale of which shall not exceed a rate equivalent to ten per cent. ad valorem at the port of entry, always excepting spirituous liquors.” Applying especially to spirituous liquors are the provisions of articles 90 to 95 of the General Act.