A slight amount of public spirit on the part of the signatories of the Berlin Act would have sufficed to prevent Congolese affairs drifting into the present highly anomalous situation. That land is not Belgian, and it is not international--except in a strictly legal sense. It is difficult to say what it is if it be not the private domain of King Leopold and of several monopolist-controlling trusts. Probably the only way out of the present slough of despond is the definite assumption of sole responsibility by the Belgian people; for it should be remembered that a very large number of patriotic Belgians urgently long to redress evils for which they feel themselves to be indirectly, and to a limited extent, chargeable. At present, those who carefully study the evidence relating to the Berlin Conference of 1885, and the facts, so far as they are ascertainable to-day, must pronounce the Congo experiment to be a terrible failure.
FOOTNOTES:
[455] L'Afrique nouvelle. Par. E. Descamps, Brussels, Paris, 1903, p. 8.
[456] For details see J. de C. Macdonell, King Leopold II., p. 113.
[457] H. von Wissmann, My Second Journey through Equatorial Africa, 1891. Rev. W.H. Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo, 2 vols.
[458] See Protocols, Parl. Papers, Africa, No. 4 (1885), pp. 119 et seq.
[459] The Story of the Congo Free State, by H.W. Wack (New York, 1905), p. 101; Wauters, L'État indépendant du Congo, pp. 36-37.
[460] The Congo State, by D.C. Boulger (London, 1896), p. 62.
[461] Cattier, Droit et Administration de l'État indépendent du Congo, p. 82.
[462] Cattier, op. cit. pp. 134-135.