FOREWORD
people had seized hold of the essential fact that the real issue was not the saturnalia of atrocity raging in the Congo forests, but the reason of it, viz: The avowed principles upon which King Leopold's administration in the Congo Free State, and the French Government's administration in the French Congo were based, and officially defended by the Belgian and French Governments and by a cohort of international lawyers. It had become clear that in those principles, which differentiated radically and completely from the principles governing the exercise of political power by European Governments in every part of tropical Africa, including the French dependencies themselves, was involved the future of the black man and the future character of European policy in Africa; that if they prevailed, if the contagion spread, the future of Africa was a future of slavery imposed in the interests of European capitalism, degrading by its accompanying and resultant effects the whole political life of Europe, and owing to its nature, calculated rapidly to destroy the African race, thereby sterilising the natural resources of the Dark Continent.
There is need for this appeal. The vividness of the conviction that an issue of transcendental potency, a something elemental, going right down to the roots of human morality, was at stake in the Congo controversy, faded with the eventual success which attended the Reform movement so far as the Congo Free State was concerned. But although that final success was registered no further back in point of time than the spring of 1913, humanity has gone through such convulsions since then, the thinking mind has been so wholly turned from its normal functional methods, that pre-war events have a tendency to appear vague and shadowy, dim ghosts of some ancient epoch. Things are forgotten, or but half remembered. And, too, the peoples of Europe have for the past four and a half years been so fed with lies; history has been so cynically falsified to serve the momentary interest of Governments; changes so revolutionary in the structure of European policy and sociology have occurred; misery so profound and loss of life on so huge a scale have eventuated—that the collective reasoning power has got out of focus. It is at such times of cataclysmic upheaval that the dark forces in the nations see their opportunity, and if public opinion be not vigilant, make haste to use it.
There is a movement on foot to apply to British tropical Africa the self-same policy, based upon the self-same principles, which decimated and ruined the Congo. The motive behind it is identical. It is being astutely engineered, sophistically urged, presented in a new garb. It is a real danger, for it is supported by great wealth and also by democratic influences, either suborned, or, as one would prefer to believe, misled by ignorance.
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