But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him into trouble, men of whose dossiers he is quite ignorant.

From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several of his “valets du roi,” press agents, and tools, men who for years have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had to leave Africa for theft.

That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt.  But that on Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be proved.  He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the handling of Mexican peons or Chinese coolies, and every step of the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of this country.

And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!

V

HUNTING THE HIPPO

Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus, and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one.  I wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was enjoying his bath in peace and confidence.  I also wanted to shoot him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small tusks hungrily protruding.  I had this desire, in spite of the fact that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted, I entertained the utmost good feeling.

As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my imagination.  Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most charming people.  They come of an ancient family.  Two thousand four hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus.  And Herodotus to the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry.  To exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single mesalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a strong title to nobility.  Other animals by contact with man have become degraded.  The lion, the “King of Beasts,” now rides a bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid.  And the elephant, the monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of burden and works for his living.  You can see him in Phoenix Park dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn.  The royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.