Leopold contradicted every known tradition of royalty. The king business is usually the business of spending unearned money. Your royal spendthrift is a much more familiar figure than the royal miser. Moreover, nobody ever associates productive power with a king save in the big family line. His task is inherited and with it a bank account sufficient to meet all needs. This immunity from economic necessity is a large price to pay for lack of liberty in speech and action. The principal job of most kings, as we all know, is to be a noble and acquiescent figure-head, to pin decorations on worthy persons, and to open public exhibitions.
Leopold did all of these things but they were incidental to his larger task. He was an insurgent from childhood. He violated all the rules of the royal game not only by having a vision and a mind all his own but in possessing a keen commercial instinct. Geography was his hobby at school. Like Rhodes, he was forever looking at maps. When he became king he saw that the hope of Belgium economically lay in colonization. In 1860 he made a journey to the Far East, whence he returned deeply impressed with trade opportunities in China. Afterwards he was the prime mover in the construction of the Pekin-Hankow Railway. I do not think most persons know that Leopold at one time tried to establish a Belgian colony in Ethiopia. Another act in his life that has escaped the casual biographer was his effort to purchase the Philippines from Spain. Now you can see why he seized upon the Congo as a colonizing possibility the moment he read Henry M. Stanley's first article about it in the London Telegraph.
There was a vital reason why Belgium should have a big and prosperous colony. Her extraordinary internal development demanded an outlet abroad. The doughty little country so aptly called "The Cockpit of Europe," and which bore the brunt of the first German advance in the Great War, is the most densely populated in the world. It has two hundred and forty-seven inhabitants for each square kilometer. England only counts one hundred and forty-six, Germany one hundred and twenty-five, France seventy-two, and the United States thirteen. The Belgians had to have economic elbow room and Leopold was determined that they should have it.
His creation of the Congo Free State was just one evidence of his shrewdness and diplomacy. Half a dozen of the great powers had their eye on this untouched garden spot in Central Africa and would have risked millions of dollars and thousands of men to grab it. Leopold, through a series of International Associations, engineered the famous Berlin Congress of 1884 and with Bismarck's help put the Free State on the map, with himself as steward. It was only a year ago in Germany that a former high-placed German statesman admitted to me that one of the few fundamental mistakes that the Iron Chancellor ever made was to permit Leopold to snatch the Congo from under the very eyes and hands of Germany. I quote this episode to show that when it came to business Leopold made every king in Europe look like an office boy. Even so masterful a manipulator of men as Cecil Rhodes failed with him. Rhodes sought his aid in his trans-African telegraph scheme but Leopold was too shrewd for him. After his first audience with the Belgian king Rhodes said to Robert Williams, "I thought I was clever but I was no match for him."
The only other modern king interested in business was the former Kaiser, Mr. Wilhelm Hohenzollern. Although he has no business sense in the way that Leopold had it, he always had a keen appreciation of big business as an imperial prop. Like Leopold, he had a congested country and realized that permanent expansion lay in colonization. The commercial magnates of Germany used him for their own ends but their teamwork advanced the whole empire. Wilhelm was a silent partner in the potash, shipping, and electric-machinery trusts. He earned whatever he received because he was in every sense an exalted press-agent,—a sort of glorified publicity promoter. His strong point was to go about proclaiming the merits of German wares and he always made it a point to scatter samples. On a visit to Italy he left behind a considerable quantity of soap. There was a great rush to get these royal left-overs. Two weeks later a small army of German soap salesmen descended upon the country selling this identical product.
Whatever may be said of Leopold, one thing is certain. He was not small. Wilhelm used the brains of other men; Leopold employed his own, and every capitalist who went up against him paid tribute to this asset.
We can now go back to 1906, the year that was to mark the advent of America into the Congo. Leopold knew that the days of the Congo as a Free State were numbered. His personally-conducted stewardship of the Colony was being assailed by the Socialists on one hand and the atrocity proclaimers on the other. Leopold was undoubtedly sincere in his desire to economically safeguard the African possession before it passed out of his control. In any event, during the summer of that year he sent a message to Ryan asking him to confer with him at Brussels. The summons came out of a clear sky and at first the American financier paid no attention to it. He was then on a holiday in Switzerland. When a second invitation came from the king, he accepted, and in September there began a series of meetings between the two men which resulted in the organization of the Forminiere and with it the dawn of a real international epoch in American enterprise.
In the light of our immense riches the timidity of American capital in actual constructive enterprise overseas is astonishing. Scrutinize the world business map and you see how shy it has been. We own rubber plantations in Sumatra, copper mines in Chile, gold interests in Ecuador, and have dabbled in Russian and Siberian mining. These undertakings are slight, however, compared with the scope of the world field and our own wealth. Mexico, where we have extensive smelting, oil, rubber, mining and agricultural investments, is so close at hand that it scarcely seems like a foreign country. Strangely enough our capital there has suffered more than in any other part of the globe. The spectacle of American pioneering in the Congo therefore takes on a peculiar significance.
There are two reasons why our capital has not wandered far afield. One is that we have a great country with enormous resources and consequently almost unlimited opportunities for the employment of cash at home. The other lies in the fact that American capital abroad is not afforded the same protection granted the money of other countries. Take British capital. It is probably the most courageous of all. The sun never sets on it. England is a small country and her money, to spread its wings, must go elsewhere. Moreover, Britain zealously safeguards her Nationals and their investments, and we, I regret to say, have not always done likewise. The moment an Englishman or the English flag is insulted a warship speeds to the spot and John Bull wants to know the reason why.
Why did Leopold seek American capital and why did he pick out Thomas F. Ryan? There are several motives and I will deal with them in order. In the first place American capital is about the only non-political money in the world. The English pound, for example, always flies the Union Jack and is a highly sensitive commodity. When England puts money into an enterprise she immediately makes the Foreign Office an accessory. German overseas enterprise is even more meddlesome. It has always been the first aid to poisonous and pernicious penetration. Even French capital is flavoured with imperialism despite the fact that it is the product of a democracy. Our dollars are not hitched to the star of empire. We have no dreams of world conquest. It is the safest politically to deal with, and Leopold recognized this fact.