Since the first edition of this pamphlet was issued, the Congo story has
entered upon a new chapter. The king’s Commission concedes the
correctness of the delineation contained in the foregoing pages. It
affirms the prevalence of frightful abuses under the king’s rule. For
eight months the king held back the Report but his commissioners had
been too deeply moved by the horrors unfolded before them in their visit
to the Congo State and the testimony presented to them had reached the
world through other sources. The digest of the report, as forwarded from
Brussels to the European and American press, was skilfully edited; and
the report itself does its best to gloss over the king’s responsibility
for the shame; but the story told in the genuine document is essentially
as hideous as anything found in the depositions of plain-speaking
missionaries. So the facts are clear,—indisputable, undisputed. The
train of revilers of missionary testimony, whose roseate pictures of
conditions under the king’s rule have beguiled the uninformed, hurries
out at the wings and Leopold is left to hold the stage, with the
skeleton that refuses longer to stay hidden in his Congo closet.
One thing the report omits to do. It does not brand or judge the system
out of which the foul breed of iniquities has sprung,—the king’s claim
to personal ownership of 800,000 square miles of territory, with all
their products, and his employment of savage hordes to realize on his
claim. Judgment of this policy the Commission holds to be beyond its
function. Being thus disqualified for striking at the roots of the
enormity, the commissioners propose such superficial reforms as occur to
them. And the king hastens to take up with their suggestion by calling
to his assistance in the work of reform a new Commission. Of this body
of fourteen members all but two are committed by their past record to
defense and maintenance of the king’s Congo policy.
So ends the king’s investigation of himself; doubtless less jubilantly
than he had planned, but withal as ineffectively as it was foredoomed to
end. One stage is achieved. The next in order is action by the Powers
responsible for the existence of the Congo State. The United States is
one of these. Such procedure is advocated in petitions to the President
and Congress, signed by John Wanamaker, Lyman Abbott, Henry Van Dyke,
David Starr Jordan and many other leading citizens. If ever the
sisterhood of civilized nations have just occasion to go up to the Hague
or some other accessible meeting place, a foreordained hour for their
assembling has now struck.