methods they could not or would not imitate.  Leopold, or the “State,” saw for the existence of the Congo only two reasons:  Rubber and Ivory.  And the collecting of this rubber and ivory was, as he saw it, the sole duty of the State and its officers.  When he threw over the part of trustee and became the Arab raider he could not waste his time, which, he had good reason to fear, might be short, upon products that, if fostered, would be of value only in later years.  Still less time had he to give to improvements that cost money and that would be of benefit to his successors.  He wanted only rubber; he wanted it at once, and he cared not at all how he obtained it.  So he spun, and still spins, the greatest of all “get-rich-quick” schemes; one of gigantic proportions, full of tragic, monstrous, nauseous details.

The only possible way to obtain rubber is through the native; as yet, in teeming forests, the white man can not work and live.  Of even Chinese coolies imported here to build a railroad ninety per cent. died.  So, with a stroke of the pen, Leopold declared all the rubber in the country the property of the “State,” and then, to make sure that the natives would work it, ordered that taxes be paid in rubber.  If, once a month (in order to keep the natives steadily at work the taxes were ordered to be paid each month instead of once a year), each village did not bring in so many baskets of rubber the King’s cannibal soldiers raided it, carried off the women as hostages, and made prisoners of the men, or killed and ate them.  For every kilo of rubber brought in in excess of the quota the King’s agent, who received the collected rubber and forwarded it down the river, was paid a commission.  Or was “paid by results.”  Another bonus was given him based on the price at which he obtained the rubber.  If he paid the native only six cents for every two pounds, he received a bonus of three cents, the cost to the State being but nine cents per kilo, but, if he paid the natives twelve cents for every two pounds, he received as a bonus less than one cent.  In a word, the more rubber the agent collected the more he personally benefited, and if he obtained it “cheaply” or for nothing—­that is, by taking hostages, making prisoners, by the whip of hippopotamus hide, by torture—­so much greater his fortune, so much richer Leopold.

 [Illustration:  A Village on the Kasai River.]

Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse.  To dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward.  It was this system of “payment by results,” evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.

One result of this system was that in seven years the natives condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the amount of fifty-five millions of dollars.  But its chief results were the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations, unprintable, unthinkable.