the Act of Berlin
declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
them.

Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."

To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
King.

What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
possible, a greater evil?

E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
improvement of the Congo, has written: "It is a little difficult to
imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessi