be guilty of robbery, or attempted robbery, of "State property." A "State" required revenue. Revenue implied taxation. The only articles in the Congo territory capable of producing revenue were the ivory, the rubber, the resinous gums and oils; which had become the property of the "State." The only medium through which these articles could be gathered, prepared and exported to Europe—where they would be sold and converted into revenue—was native labour. Native labour would be called upon to furnish those articles in the name of "taxation." Richard Harding Davis, the American traveller, has given colloquial expression to this Policy, whose effects on the spot he had the opportunity of studying in 1908:
To me the fact of greatest interest about the Congo is that it is owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned, by one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it… It does not sound like anything we have heard since the days and the ways of Pharoah. … That in the Congo he has killed trade and made the produce of the land his own; that of the natives he did not kill he has made slaves is what to-day gives the Congo its chief interest.
In the nature of the case, the execution of this Policy took some years before it could become really effective and systematic. The process called for some ingenuity and a certain breadth of vision, for a good many issues were involved. In the first place, the notion that an economic relationship existed between the European and the Congo native, that the native had anything to sell, must be thoroughly stamped out. Regulations were issued forbidding the natives to sell rubber or ivory to European merchants, and threatening the latter with prosecution if they bought these articles from the natives. In the second place, every official in the country had to be made a partner in the business of getting rubber and ivory out of the natives in the guise of "taxation." Circulars, which remained secret for many years, were sent out, to the effect that the paramount duty of Officials was to make their districts yield the greatest possible quantity of these articles; promotion would be reckoned on that basis. As a further stimulus to "energetic action" a system of sliding-scale bonuses was elaborated,
