d 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