FOREWORD
and who are unacquainted with the evidence of it in this particular case. When indications of the inevitable consequences of the System began to filter through, and inspired some generous minds—with which France abounds—to indignant protest, numerous causes combined to defeat these efforts and to perpetuate the evil. This will be made clear to the reader as the narrative proceeds.
Let us not lose sight of the following point, which is of capital importance in considering the Congo "System." The barbarities which disgrace the culmination of impolicy and wrong, and which are familiar to us in the story of German South-West Africa, of Southern Rhodesia, of Tripoli, and so many others—these are episodical, temporary. They do not represent a permanent state of affairs. Once the recalcitrant African community has been defeated and "punished," there is no longer any intelligent reason for continuing the killing process. On the contrary, the utilitarian motive of preservation steps in. The interest of the conqueror is to conserve—for no African land is of use to the white man without black labour. Injustice, cruelty—these may persist. But self-interest stops short at destruction. The purpose in hand has the character of permanence—whether the object be white settlement or political control.
But the motives and circumstances operating in the Congo differed absolutely in those vital respects. The beneficiaries aimed at no work of permanence, no constructive national task. They had no enduring interest in the Congo. Their one and only object was to get as much indiarubber out of it as they could in the shortest possible time, and to inflate their rubber shares on the stock exchange. And a perennial state of warfare all over the Congo was necessary to the accomplishment of that object, because there was no finality in the demand. It was incessant. An act of political submission after the usual massacre of unarmed—in the modern sense—men by armed men did not suffice. The community, clan or tribe, must produce india rubber and continue to produce it, and must be fought and fought and fought again, tortured through its women, deprived of homesteads and foodstuffs; until broken, hunted, starving, fugitive, despairing, every capacity to resist demands, however outrageous, every shred of self-respect, had vanished. For twenty years in the Congo Free State, for ten years (at least) in the French Congo this process continued, its victims being numbered by millions.
What I desire to emphasise in these introductory lines is the importance of the System itself, and of the claims upon which it is based, being thoroughly grasped by the public. In the latter years of the Congo Reform movement they had become well understood, and106
