“There was no doubt that these people were not inventing. Their
vehemence, their flashing eyes, their excitement, were not
simulated.”
Of course the critic had to divulge that; he has no self-respect. All
his kind reproach me, although they know quite well that I took no
pleasure in punishing the men in that particular way, but only did it as
a warning to other delinquents. Ordinary punishments are no good with
ignorant savages; they make no impression. [_Reads more sub-heads_]
“Devastated region; population reduced from 40,000 to 8,000.”
He does not take the trouble to say how it happened. He is fertile in
concealments. He hopes his readers and his Congo reformers, of the
Lord-Aberdeen-Norbury-John-Morley-Sir-Gilbert-Parker stripe, will think
they were all killed. They were not. The great majority of them escaped.
They fled to the bush with their families because of the rubber raids,
and it was there they died of hunger. Could we help that?
[Illustration:
On Dress Parade
]
One of my sorrowing critics observes: “Other Christian rulers tax their
people, but furnish schools, courts of law, roads, light, water and
protection to life and limb in return; King Leopold taxes his stolen
nation, but provides _nothing in return but hunger, terror, grief,
shame, captivity, mutilation and massacre_.” That is their style! I
furnish “nothing”! I send the gospel to the survivors; these
censure-mongers know it, but they would rather have their tongues cut
out than mention it. I have several times required my raiders to give
the dying an opportunity to kiss the sacred emblem; and if they obeyed
me I have without doubt been the humble means of saving many souls. None
of my traducers have had the fairness to mention this; but let it pass;
there is One who has not overlooked it, and that is my solace, that is
my consolation.
[_Puts down the Report, takes up a pamphlet, glances along the middle of
it_]
This is where the “death-trap” comes in. Meddlesome missionary spying
around—Rev. W. H. Sheppard. Talks with a black raider of mine after a
raid; cozens him into giving away some particulars. The raider remarks:
“‘I demanded 30 slaves from this side of the stream and 30 from the
other side; 2 points of ivory, 2,500 balls of rubber, 13 goats, 10
fowls and 6 dogs, some corn chumy, etc.’
‘How did the fight come up?’ I asked.
‘I sent for all their chiefs, sub-chiefs, men and women, to come on
a certain day, saying that I was going to finish all the palaver.
When they entered these small gates (the walls being made of fences
brought from other villages, the high native ones) I demanded all my
pay or I would kill them; so they refused to pay me, and I ordered
the fence to be closed so they couldn’t run away; then we killed
them here inside the fence. The panels of the fence fell down and
some escaped.’
‘How many did you kill?’ I asked.
‘We killed plenty, will you see some of them?’
That was just what I wanted.
He said: ‘I think we have killed between eighty and ninety, and
those in the other villages I don’t know, I did not go out but sent
my people.’
He and I walked out on the plain just near the camp. There were
three dead bodies with the flesh carved off from the waist down.
‘Why are they carved so, only leaving the bones?’ I asked.
‘My people ate them,’ he answered promptly. He then explained, ‘The
men who have young children do not eat people, but all the rest ate
them.’ On the left was a big man, shot in the back and without a
head. (All these corpses were nude.)
‘Where is the man’s head?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they made a bowl of the forehead to rub up tobacco and diamba
in.’
We continued to walk and examine until late in the afternoon, and
counted forty-one bodies. The rest had been eaten up by the people.
On returning to the camp, we crossed a young woman, shot in the back
of the head, one hand was cut away. I asked why, and Mulunba N’Cusa
explained that they always cut off the right hand to give to the
State on their return.
‘Can you not show me some of the hands?’ I asked.
So he conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning
a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands—I counted them,
eighty-one in all.
There were not less than sixty women (Bena Pianga) prisoners. I saw
them.
We all say that we have as fully as possible investigated the whole
outrage, and find it was a plan previously made to get all the stuff
possible and to catch and kill the poor people in the ‘death-trap.’”
[Illustration:
MULUNBA CHIEF OF CANNIBAL TRIBE NEAR LUEBO, CONGO STATE FIGURE
REPRODUCED FROM PHOTOGRAPH
“Mulunba N’Cusa explained.”—_Page 24._
]
_Another_ detail, as we see!—cannibalism. They report cases of it with a
most offensive frequency. My traducers do not forget to remark that,
inasmuch as I am absolute and with a word can prevent in the Congo
anything I choose to prevent, then whatsoever is done there by my
permission is my act, my _personal_ act; that _I_ do it; that the hand
of my agent is as truly my hand as if it were attached to my own arm;
and so they picture me in my robes of state, with my crown on my head,
munching human flesh, saying grace, mumbling thanks to Him from whom all
good things come. Dear, dear, when the soft-hearts get hold of a thing
like that missionary’s contribution they quite lose their tranquility
over it. They speak out profanely and reproach Heaven for allowing such
a fiend to live. Meaning me. They think it irregular. They go shuddering
around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from
25,000,000 to 15,000,000 in the twenty years of my administration; then
they burst out and call me “the King with Ten Million Murders on his
Soul.” They call me a “record.” The most of them do not stop with
charging merely the 10,000,000 against me. No, they reflect that but for
me the population, by natural increase, would now be 30,000,000, so they
charge another 5,000,000 against me and make my total death-harvest
15,000,000. They remark that the man who killed the goose that laid the
golden egg was responsible for the eggs she would subsequently have laid
if she had been let alone. Oh, yes, they call me a “record.” They remark
that twice in a generation, in India, the Great Famine destroys
2,000,000 out of a population of 320,000,000, and the whole world holds
up its hands in pity and horror; then they fall to wondering where the
world would find room for its emotions if I had a chance to trade places
with the Great Famine for twenty years! The idea fires their fancy, and
they go on and imagine the Famine coming in state at the end of the
twenty years and prostrating itself before me, saying: “Teach me, Lord,
I perceive that I am but an apprentice.” And next they imagine Death
coming, with his scythe and hour-glass, and begging me to marry his
daughter and reorganize his plant and run the business. For the whole
world, you see! By this time their diseased minds are under full steam,
and they get down their books and expand their labors, with me for text.
They hunt through all biography for my match, working Attila,
Torquemada, Ghengis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, and the rest of that crowd
for all they are worth, and evilly exulting when they cannot find it.
Then they examine the historical earthquakes and cyclones and blizzards
and cataclysms and volcanic eruptions: verdict, none of them “in it”
with me. At last they do really hit it (as they think), and they close
their labors with conceding—reluctantly—that I have _one_ match in
history, but only one—the _Flood_. This is intemperate.
But they are always that, when they think of me. They can no more keep
quiet when my name is mentioned than can a glass of water control its
feelings with a seidlitz powder in its bowels. The bizarre things they
can imagine, with me for an inspiration! One Englishman offers to give
me the odds of three to one and bet me anything I like, up to 20,000
guineas, that for 2,000,000 years I am going to be the most conspicuous
foreigner in hell. The man is so beside himself with anger that he does
not perceive that the idea is foolish. Foolish and unbusinesslike: you
see, there could be no winner; both of us would be losers, on account of
the loss of interest on the stakes; at four or five per cent.
compounded, this would amount to—I do not know how much, exactly, but,
by the time the term was up and the bet payable, a person could buy hell
itself with the accumulation.
Another madman wants to construct a memorial for the perpetuation of my
name, out of my 15,000,000 skulls and skeletons, and is full of
vindictive enthusiasm over his strange project. He has it all ciphered
out and drawn to scale. Out of the skulls he will build a combined
monument and mausoleum to me which shall exactly duplicate the Great
Pyramid of Cheops, whose base covers thirteen acres, and whose apex is
451 feet above ground. He desires to stuff me and stand me up in the sky
on that apex, robed and crowned, with my “pirate flag” in one hand and a
butcher-knife and pendant handcuffs in the other. He will build the
pyramid in the centre of a depopulated tract, a brooding solitude
covered with weeds and the mouldering ruins of burned villages, where
the spirits of the starved and murdered dead will voice their laments
forever in the whispers of the wandering winds. Radiating from the
pyramid, like the spokes of a wheel, there are to be forty grand avenues
of approach, each thirty-five miles long, and each fenced on both sides
by skull-less skeletons standing a yard and a half apart and festooned
together in line by short chains stretching from wrist to wrist and
attached to tried and true old handcuffs stamped with my private
trade-mark, a crucifix and butcher-knife crossed, with motto, “By this
sign we prosper;” each osseous fence to consist of 200,000 skeletons on
a side, which is 400,000 to each avenue. It is remarked with
satisfaction that it aggregates three or four thousand miles
(single-ranked) of skeletons,—15,000,000 all told—and would stretch
across America from New York to San Francisco. It is remarked further,
in the hopeful tone of a railroad company forecasting showy extensions
of its mileage, that my output is 500,000 corpses a year when my plant
is running full time, and that therefore if I am spared ten years longer
there will be fresh skulls enough to add 175 feet to the pyramid, making
it by a long way the loftiest architectural construction on the earth,
and fresh skeletons enough to continue the transcontinental file (on
piles) a thousand miles into the Pacific. The cost of gathering the
materials from my “widely scattered and innumerable private graveyards,”
and transporting them, and building the monument and the radiating grand
avenues, is duly ciphered out, running into an aggregate of millions of
guineas, and then—why then, (—— ——!! —— ——!!) this idiot asks me to
_furnish the money!_ [_Sudden and effusive application of the crucifix_]
He reminds me that my yearly income from the Congo is millions of
guineas, and that “_only_” 5,000,000 would be required for his
enterprise. Every day wild attempts are made upon my purse; they do not
affect me, they cost me not a thought. But _this one_—this one troubles
me, makes me nervous; for there is no telling what an unhinged creature
like this may think of next.... _If he should think of Carnegie_—but I
must banish that thought out of my mind! it worries my days; it troubles
my sleep. That way lies madness. [_After a pause_] There is no other
way—I have got to buy Carnegie.
[Illustration:
“My yearly income from the Congo is millions of guineas.”—_Page 29._
]
[_Harrassed and muttering, walks the floor a while, then takes to the
Consul’s chapter-headings again. Reads_]
“Government starved a woman’s children to death and killed her
sons.”
“Butchery of women and children.”
“_The native has been converted into a being without ambition
because without hope._”
“Women chained by the neck by rubber sentries.”
“Women refuse to bear children because, with a baby to carry, they
cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers.”
[Illustration:
“Women chained by the neck”
]
“Statement of a child. ‘I, my mother, my grandmother and my sister,
we ran away into the bush. A great number of our people were killed
by the soldiers.... After that they saw a little bit of my mother’s
head, and the soldiers ran quickly to where we were and caught my
grandmother, my mother, my sister and another little one younger
than us. Each wanted my mother for a wife, and argued about it, so
they finally decided to kill her. They shot her through the stomach
with a gun and she fell, and when I saw that I cried very much,
because they killed my grandmother and mother and I was left alone.
I saw it all done!’”
It has a sort of pitiful sound, although they are only blacks. It
carries me back and back into the past, to when my children were little,
and would fly—to the bush, so to speak—when they saw me coming....
[_Resumes the reading of chapter-headings of the Consul’s report_]
“They put a knife through a child’s stomach.”
“They cut off the hands and brought them to C. D. (white officer)
and spread them out in a row for him to see. They left them lying
there, because the white man had seen them, so they did not need to
take them to P.”
“Captured children left in the bush to die, by the soldiers.”
“Friends came to ransom a captured girl; but sentry refused, saying
the white man wanted her because she was young.”
[Illustration: