Mr. Clutterbuck's Election

by Hilaire Belloc

That salvation had been only recently achieved, but the hideous rule of Leopold no longer weighed upon the innocent and unfortunate cannibals of equatorial Africa; dawn had broken at last upon those millions whom Christ died to save, and whom so many missionaries had undertaken hasty and expensive voyages to free from an exploitation odious to the principles of our Common Law.

But though the consummation of that great event, which history will always record as the chief achievement of modern England, was but freshly written upon the tablets of our age, there were not a few in the financial and ecclesiastical world of London who could read the signs of the times, and could appreciate the material results which would follow upon the advent of Christian liberty for these unhappy men. I have but to mention Sir Joseph Gorley, the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Shoreham, Sir Harry Hog, Mrs. Entwistle, Lord Barry, the Dean of Betchworth, Lord Blackwater, and his second son, the Hon. I. Benzinger, to show the stuff of which the reformers were composed.

There were some, indeed, to whom the financial necessities of the unhappy natives were but a second consideration, absorbed as they were in the spiritual needs of the African; but there were others who saw, with the sturdy common sense which has led us to all our victories, that little could be done even upon the spiritual side, until marshes had been drained, forests cleared, fields ploughed, and the most carefully chosen implements imported from as carefully chosen merchants in the capitals of Europe. The directing hand and brain of the European must be lent to raise the material position of those unhappy savages in whom the Belgian had almost obliterated the semblance of humanity.

For this purpose had been chosen, after long thought by those best acquainted with the district, Mr. Charles Hatton, brother of that Mr. Sachs whose name will be familiar to all as the originator of the Society for the Prevention of the Trade in Tobacco to the Inhabitants of Liberia, and the successful manager of Chutes Limited.

Mr. Hatton, who, upon his marriage with Amelia, daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Hatton, of Hatton Hall, Hatton, in Herefordshire, had adopted his father-in-law's name and had lent the whole of his considerable fortune, and of his yet more considerable talents, to the uplifting of the equatorial negro. Mr. Hatton it was who successfully carried through the negotiations with the Colonial Committee of the Belgian Parliament, and who obtained for his syndicate the concession of the Manatasara district for twenty-one years.

The first act of the concessionaires was to take advantage of the new regulations whereby future chartered rulers in the Congo might declare the native to be the owner of his land. The soil to which these poor blacks were born was restored to them. The hideous system of forced labour was at once ended, and in its place one uniform hut tax was imposed upon the whole community. All were free, and though the actual amount of labour required to discharge the tax was perhaps triple the old assessment, yet as it fell equally upon the whole tribe, no complaint of injustice could be made, nor, to judge from the absence of complaint in the London papers, was any felt.

In many other ways the new régime witnessed to the great truth that business and righteousness are not opposed in the Dark Continent. Where the native had been permitted to run free at every risk to his morals and to ours, he was now segregated in neat compounds under a tutelage suitable to his stage of development. The early marriages at which the fatuous Continental friars had winked, were severely repressed. The adoption of Christianity in any of its forms (except Mormonism), was left to the free exercise of individual choice, but the pestilent folly of ordaining native priests was at once forbidden. Most important of all, the abominable restriction of human liberty by which, under the accursed rule of King Leopold the native's very food and drink had been supervised, was replaced by an ample liberty in which he was free to accept or to reject the beverages of civilisation. The natural temptation which gin at a penny the bottle offers to a primitive being was not met as of old by slavish prohibition, but by the wiser and more noble engine of persuasion, and the temperance leagues already springing up in the coast towns, gave promise of deep effect upon the general tone of the native community.

To all this beneficent endeavour, capital alone was lacking. To look for it in the hardened and worldly centres of the continent was hopeless. Those who in our own country would some years ago have been the first to come forward, had recently so suffered through the necessary initial expense of Rhode's glorious dream, that with all the good will in the world they hesitated to embark upon novel ventures in Africa.

More than one godly woman, persuaded by the eloquence of those who had heard of the atrocities, was willing to venture her few hundreds; and more than one wealthy manufacturer bestowed considerable donations of fifty pounds and more upon the spiritual side of the new enterprise: one high spirit of fire endowed a bishopric with £300 a year for three years. But the attempt to float a company upon the basis of the concession was still in jeopardy, and it seemed for a moment as though all those years of effort to destroy the infamy of Leopold's control had been thrown away.

The concessionaires, eager as they were to work in the vineyard, could hardly be expected to go forward until the general public should take something of the burden off their hands. It was under these circumstances that the Manatasara Syndicate and its offspring the company stood in the spring of 1910.