Some tell you they do not interfere because they are jealous one of the other; others say that it is because they believe the Congo will soon be taken over by Belgium, and with Belgium in control, they argue, they would be dealing with a responsible government, instead of with a pirate.  But so long as Leopold is King of Belgium one doubts if Belgians in the Congo would rise above the level of their King.  The English, when asked why they do not assert their rights, granted not only to them, but to thirteen other governments, reply that if they did they would be accused of “ulterior motives.”  What ulterior motives?  If you pursue a pickpocket and recover your watch from him, are your motives in doing so open to suspicion?

Personally, although this is looking some way ahead, I would like to see the English take over and administrate the Congo.  Wherever I visit a colony governed by Englishmen I find under their administration, in spite of opium in China and gin on the West Coast, that three people are benefited:  the Englishman, the native, and the foreign trader from any other part of the world.  Of the colonies of what other country can one say the same?

As a rule our present governments are not loath to protect their rights.  But toward asserting them in the Congo they have been moved neither by the protests of traders, chambers of commerce, missionaries, the public press, nor by the cry of the black man to “let my people go.”  By only those in high places can it be explained.  We will leave it as a curious fact, and return to the “Unjust Steward.”

His first act was to wage wars upon the Arabs.  From the Soudan and from the East Coast they were raiding the Congo for slaves and ivory, and he drove them from it.  By these wars he accomplished two things.  As the defender of the slave, he gained much public credit, and he kept the ivory.  But war is expensive, and soon he pointed out to the Powers that to ask him out of his own pocket to maintain armies in the field and to administer a great estate was unfair.  He humbly sought their permission to levy a few taxes.  It seemed a reasonable request.  To clear roads, to keep boats upon the great rivers, to mark it with buoys, to maintain wood stations for the steamers, to improve the “moral and material welfare of the natives,” would cost money, and to allow Leopold to bring about these improvements, which would be for the good of all, he was permitted to levy the few taxes.  That was twenty years ago; to-day I saw none of these improvements, and the taxes have increased.

From the first they were so heavy that the great trade houses, which for one hundred years in peace and mutual goodwill bartered with the natives, found themselves ruined.  It was not alone the export taxes, lighterage dues, port dues, and personal taxes that drove them out of the Congo; it was the King appearing against them as a rival trader, the man appointed to maintain the “open door.”  And a trader with