and that the punishment meted out for failure to comply with the official demands led to many barbarous actions on the part of officials and their native troops.  Thus, at Bolobo, he found large numbers of industrious workers in iron who had fled from the “Domaine de la Couronne” (King Leopold’s private domain) because “they had endured such ill-treatment at the hands of the Government officials and Government soldiers in their own country that life had become intolerable, that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber, or to die of starvation or exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them[480].”

[Footnote 480:  Parl.  Papers, Africa, No.  I (1904), pp. 29, 60.  A missionary, Rev. J. White-head, wrote in July 1903:  “During the past seven years this ‘domaine prive’ of King Leopold has been a veritable ‘hell on earth.’” (Ibid. p. 64).]

On the north side of Lake Mantumba Mr. Casement found that the population had diminished by 60 or 70 per cent since the imposition of the rubber tax in 1893—­a fact, however, which may be partly assigned to the sleeping sickness.  The tax led to constant fighting, until at last the officials gave up the effort and imposed a requisition of food or gum-copal; the change seems to have been satisfactory there and in other parts where it has been tried.  In the former time the native soldiers punished delinquents with mutilation:  proofs on this subject here and in several other places were indisputable.  On the River Lulongo, Mr. Casement found that the amount of rubber collected from the natives generally proved to be in proportion to the number of guns used by the collecting force[481].  In some few cases natives were shot, even by white officers, on account of their failure to bring in the due amount of rubber[482].  A comparatively venial form of punishment was the capture and detention of wives until their husbands made up the tale.  Is it surprising that thousands of the natives of the north have fled into French Congoland, itself by no means free from the grip of monopolist companies, but not terrorised as are most of the tribes of the “Free State”?

[Footnote 481:  Ibid. pp. 34, 43, 44, 49, 76, etc.]

[Footnote 482:  Ibid. p. 70.  The effort made by the Chevalier De Cuvelier to rebut Mr. Casement’s charges consists mainly of an ineffective tu quoque.  To compare the rubber-tax of the Congo State with the hut-tax of Sierra Leone begs the whole question.  Mr. Casement proves (p. 27) that the natives do not object to reasonable taxation which comes regularly.  They do object to demands for rubber which are excessive and often involve great privations.  Above all, the punishments utterly cow them and cause them to flee to the forests.