I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities.  In the Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to “close up” the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.  But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months’ march from the capital, the cruelties still continue.  I did not see them.  Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see the massacre of blacks in Atlanta.  But they have reason to believe it occurred.  And after one has talked with the men and women who have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them, but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the sight of men, all things are possible.  Merchants, missionaries, and officials even in Leopold’s service told me that if one could spare a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they say is true.  I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as that of the Abolitionists.

Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board.  For instance.  In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or child.  These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts along the river.  They are no longer in evidence.  Neither is the flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.  A quaint conceit.

The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is Leopold.  Had he shaken his head they would have ceased.  When the hue and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they did cease.  At least along the main waterways.  Years before he could have stopped them.  But these were the seven fallow years, when millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would pay Leopold their weight in gold.