by the American Government; by the Commission which King Leopold was himself forced by public opinion to send out and whose evidence, but not whose report, damning even its whitewashing attenuations, he suppressed[1]; by the King of Italy's envoy, Dr. Baccari, who was dispatched on a special mission to the Congo owing to the bitter complaints and protests of Italian officers who had been induced to take up commissions in the King's African armies; by Protestant and Catholic missionaries, and by one or two Belgian officials like the courageous magistrate Lefranc.
The "Crown domain," the portion of the territory whose revenue (i.e., whose ivory and rubber) the King kept for his own private uses, produced in the ten years 1896–1905, 11,354 tone of india-rubber, the profit upon which, at the comparatively low prices prevailing over that period of years and after deducting expenses, yielded £3,179,120. This leaves out of account the ivory, the particulars of which remained inaccessible. In this region fighting was incessant for years and the loss of life was immense. It was reckoned that in one district alone 6,000 natives were killed and mutilated every six months. The rubber was eventually worked out and the wretched remnants of the population were constrained to gather copal (gum exuding from certain trees) the whole year round. In the early nineties the territories of the "Crown domain" included some of the most densely-populated regions of the Congo, with many large and flourishing towns. The early travellers—Belgian, British and others—along the rivers which bisect it, spoke of the "dense masses" of natives who crowded its river banks, the prosperous, well-cared villages, the abundance of live-stock. In fifteen years it was reduced to a desert. Scrivener, who travelled through a considerable portion of it in 1903, and Murdoch four years later by another route, pursued their way for weeks on end without encountering a single human being, passing on every hand vestiges of a once abundant population, long miles of ruined, mouldering villages thickly strewn with skeletons, plantations merging again into "bush," bananas rotting in erstwhile groves that supplied the wants of these vanished communities, the silence of the tropical
- ↑ The evidence tendered before the Commission by the British and American missionaries was published in English and French by the Congo Reform Association.
