The efforts of Mr. Macdonnell in King Leopold II. (London, 1905) to refute Mr. Casement also seem to me weak and inconclusive.  The reply of the Congo Free State is printed by Mr. H.W.  Wack in the Appendix of his Story of the Congo Free State (New York, 1905).  It convicts Mr. Casement of inaccuracy on a few details.  Despite all that has been written by various apologists, it may be affirmed that the Congo Free State has yet made no adequate defence.  Possibly it will appear in the report which, it is hoped, will be published in full by the official commission of inquiry now sitting.]

Livingstone, in his day, regarded ivory as the chief cause of the slave-trade in Central and Eastern Africa; but it is questionable whether even ivory (now a vanishing product) brought more woe to millions of negroes than the viscous fluid which enables the pleasure-seekers of Paris, London, and New York to rush luxuriously through space.  The swift Juggernaut of the present age is accountable for as much misery as ever sugar or ivory was in the old slave days.  But it seems that, so long as the motor-car industry prospers, the dumb woes of the millions of Africa will count for little in the Courts of Europe.  During the session of 1904 Lord Lansdowne made praiseworthy efforts to call their attention to the misgovernment of the Congo State; but he met with no response except from the United States, Italy, and Turkey(!) A more signal proof of the weakness and cynical selfishness now prevalent in high quarters has never been given than in this abandonment of a plain and bounden duty.

A slight amount of public spirit on the part of the signatories of the Berlin Act would have sufficed to prevent Congolese affairs drifting into the present highly anomalous situation.  That land is not Belgian, and it is not international—­except in a strictly legal sense.  It is difficult to say what it is if it be not the private domain of King Leopold and of several monopolist-controlling trusts.  Probably the only way out of the present slough of despond is the definite assumption of sole responsibility by the Belgian people; for it should be remembered that a very large number of patriotic Belgians urgently long to redress evils for which they feel themselves to be indirectly, and to a limited extent, chargeable.  At present, those who carefully study the evidence relating to the Berlin Conference of 1885, and the facts, so far as they are ascertainable to-day, must pronounce the Congo experiment to be a terrible failure.

CHAPTER XX

RUSSIA IN THE FAR EAST

“This war, waged . . . for the command of the waters of the Pacific Ocean, so urgently necessary for the peaceful prosperity, not only of our own, but of other nations.”—­The Czar’s Proclamation of March 3, 1905.

Of all the collisions of racial interests that have made recent history, none has turned the thoughts