E.R.  Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the improvement of the Congo, has written:  “It is a little difficult to imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in slave-driving.  The trouble is that they probably know nothing about African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere ‘laborers’ for the white man’s benefit, possessing no rights in land nor in the produce of the soil.  If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by ‘commercial methods,’ we welcome their advent.  But we would point out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them.  No such monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a trade system.  If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the Congo hell is assured.”

The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the Guggenheims.  They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type.  Like other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and to assist those less fortunate than themselves.

For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it successfully.  Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with fairness.

“Why should you suppose,” Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, “that in the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly?  In Mexico we found the natives ill-paid and ill-fed.  We fed them and paid them well.  Not from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business.  It is not good business to cut off a workman’s hands or head.  We are not ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the Congo we are not going to spoil our record.”

I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold, tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his agents might do there he could not possibly know.  To this Mr. Guggenheim answered that “Neither Leopold nor anyone else can dictate how we shall treat the native labor,” that if his agents were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that they accepted that responsibility.