ough the company still
exists.

I will briefly narrate its experience to show that the product which
raised the tempest around King Leopold's head and which for years was
synonymous with the name of the Congo, has practically ceased to be an
important commercial commodity in the Colony. The reason is obvious. In
Leopold's day nine-tenths of the world's supply of rubber was wild and
came from Brazil and the Congo. It cost about fifty cents a pound to
gather and sold for a dollar. Today more than ninety per cent of the
rubber supply is grown on plantations in the Dutch East Indies, the
Malay States, and the Straits Settlements, where it costs about twenty
cents a pound to gather and despite the big slump in price since the
war, is profitable. In the Congo there is still wild rubber and a
movement is under way to develop large plantations. Labor is scarce,
however, while in the East millions of coolies are available. This tells
the whole rubber story.

The Ball-Mohun Expedition was more successful than its mate for it
opened up a mineral empire and laid the foundations of the Little
America that you shall soon see. Mohun was administrative head and Ball
the technical head and chief engineer. Other members were Millard K.
Shaler, afterwards one of Hoover's most efficient aids in the relief of
Belgium, and Arthur F. Smith, geologists; Roland B. Oliver, topographer;
A. E. H. and C. A. Reid, and N. Janot, prospectors.

Mohun, who had been engaged on account of his knowledge of the country,
had been American Consul at Zanzibar and at Boma, and first left
diplomacy to fight the Arab slave-traders in the interior. When someone
asked him why he had quit the United States Government service to go on
a military mission he said, "I prefer killing Arabs in the interior to
killing time at Boma." He figured as one of Richard Harding Davis'
"Soldiers of Fortune" and was in every sense a unique personality.

You get some idea of the hazards that confronted the American pioneers
when I say that when they set forth for the Kasai region, which is the
southwestern part of the Congo, late in 1907, they were accompanied by a
battalion of native troops under Belgian officers. Often they had to
fight their way before they could take specimens. On one occasion Ball
was prospecting in a region hitherto uninvaded by the white man. He was
attacked by a large body of hostile savages and a pitched battle
followed. In informal Congo history this eng