Far more important is the moral gain which has resulted from the suppression of the slave-trade over a large part of the State.  On this point we may quote the testimony of Mr. Roger Casement, British Consul at Boma, in an official report founded on observations taken during a long tour up the Congo.  He writes:  “The open selling of slaves and the canoe convoys which once navigated the Upper Congo have everywhere disappeared.  No act of the Congo State Government has perhaps produced more laudable results than the vigorous suppression of this widespread evil[471].”

[Footnote 471:  Parl.  Papers, Africa, No.  I (1904), p. 26.]

King Leopold has also striven hard to extend the bounds of the Congo State.  Not satisfied with his compact with France of April 1887, which fixed the River Ubangi and its tributaries as the boundary of their possessions, he pushed ahead to the north-east of those confines, and early in the nineties established posts at Lado on the White Nile and in the Bahr-el-Ghazal basin.  Clearly his aim was to conquer the districts which Egypt for the time had given up to the Mahdi.  These efforts brought about sharp friction between the Congolese authorities and France and Great Britain.  After long discussions the Cabinet of London agreed to the convention of May 12, 1894, whereby the Congo State gained the Bahr-el-Ghazal basin and the left bank of the Upper Nile, together with a port on the Albert Nyanza.  On his side, King Leopold recognised the claims of England to the right bank of the Nile and to a strip of land between the Albert Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika.  Owing to the strong protests of France and Germany this agreement was rescinded, and the Cabinet of Paris finally compelled King Leopold to give up all claims to the Bahr-el-Ghazal, though he acquired the right to lease the Lado district below the Albert Nyanza.  The importance of these questions in the development of British policy in the Nile basin has been pointed out in Chapter XVII.

The ostensible aim, however, of the founders of the Congo Free State was, not the exploitation of the Upper Nile district, the making of railways and the exportation of great quantities of ivory and rubber from Congoland, but the civilising and uplifting of Central Africa.  The General Act of the Berlin Conference begins with an invocation to Almighty God; and the Brussels Conference imitated its predecessor in this particular.  It is, therefore, as a civilising and moralising agency that the Congo Government will always be judged at the bar of posterity.

The first essential of success in dealing with backward races is sympathy with their most cherished notions.  Yet from the very outset one of these was violated.  On July 1, 1885, a decree of the Congo Free State asserted that all vacant lands were the property of the Government, that is, virtually of the King himself.  Further, on June 30, 1887, an ordinance was decreed, claiming the right to let or sell domains, and to grant mining or wood-cutting rights on any land, “the ownership of which is not recognised as appertaining to any one.”  These decrees, we may remark, were for some time kept secret, until their effects became obvious.