Part 2

“Two hundred and forty persons, _men, women and children_, compelled to supply government with _one ton_ of carefully prepared foodstuffs _per week_, receiving in remuneration, all told, the princely sum of 15s. 10d!”

Very well, it was liberal. It was not much short of a penny a week for each nigger. It suits this consul to belittle it, yet he knows very well that I could have had both the food and the labor for nothing. I can prove it by a thousand instances. [_Reads_]

“Expedition against a village behindhand in its (compulsory) supplies; result, slaughter of sixteen persons; among them three women and a boy of five years. Ten carried off, to be prisoners till ransomed; among them a child, who died during the march.”

But he is careful not to explain that we are _obliged_ to resort to ransom to collect debts, where the people have nothing to pay with. Families that escape to the woods sell some of their members into slavery and thus provide the ransom. He knows that I would stop this if I could find a less objectionable way to collect their debts.... Mm—here is some more of the consul’s delicacy! He reports a conversation he had with some natives:

Q. “How do you know it was the _white_ men themselves who ordered these cruel things to be done to you? These things must have been done without the white man’s knowledge by the black soldiers.”

A. “The white men told their soldiers: ‘You only kill _women_; you cannot kill men. You must prove that you kill men.’ So then the soldiers when they killed us” (here he stopped and hesitated and then pointing to ... he said:) “then they ... and took them to the white men, who said: ‘It is true, you have killed _men_.’”

Q. “You say this is true? Were many of you so treated after being shot?”

All [_shouting out_]: “_Nkoto! Nkoto!_” (“Very many! Very many!”)

“There was no doubt that these people were not inventing. Their vehemence, their flashing eyes, their excitement, were not simulated.”

Of course the critic had to divulge that; he has no self-respect. All his kind reproach me, although they know quite well that I took no pleasure in punishing the men in that particular way, but only did it as a warning to other delinquents. Ordinary punishments are no good with ignorant savages; they make no impression. [_Reads more sub-heads_]

“Devastated region; population reduced from 40,000 to 8,000.”

He does not take the trouble to say how it happened. He is fertile in concealments. He hopes his readers and his Congo reformers, of the Lord-Aberdeen-Norbury-John-Morley-Sir-Gilbert-Parker stripe, will think they were all killed. They were not. The great majority of them escaped. They fled to the bush with their families because of the rubber raids, and it was there they died of hunger. Could we help that?

One of my sorrowing critics observes: “Other Christian rulers tax their people, but furnish schools, courts of law, roads, light, water and protection to life and limb in return; King Leopold taxes his stolen nation, but provides _nothing in return but hunger, terror, grief, shame, captivity, mutilation and massacre_.” That is their style! I furnish “nothing”! I send the gospel to the survivors; these censure-mongers know it, but they would rather have their tongues cut out than mention it. I have several times required my raiders to give the dying an opportunity to kiss the sacred emblem; and if they obeyed me I have without doubt been the humble means of saving many souls. None of my traducers have had the fairness to mention this; but let it pass; there is One who has not overlooked it, and that is my solace, that is my consolation.

[_Puts down the Report, takes up a pamphlet, glances along the middle of it_]

This is where the “death-trap” comes in. Meddlesome missionary spying around—Rev. W. H. Sheppard. Talks with a black raider of mine after a raid; cozens him into giving away some particulars. The raider remarks:

“‘I demanded 30 slaves from this side of the stream and 30 from the other side; 2 points of ivory, 2,500 balls of rubber, 13 goats, 10 fowls and 6 dogs, some corn chumy, etc.’

‘How did the fight come up?’ I asked.

‘I sent for all their chiefs, sub-chiefs, men and women, to come on a certain day, saying that I was going to finish all the palaver. When they entered these small gates (the walls being made of fences brought from other villages, the high native ones) I demanded all my pay or I would kill them; so they refused to pay me, and I ordered the fence to be closed so they couldn’t run away; then we killed them here inside the fence. The panels of the fence fell down and some escaped.’

‘How many did you kill?’ I asked.

‘We killed plenty, will you see some of them?’

That was just what I wanted.

He said: ‘I think we have killed between eighty and ninety, and those in the other villages I don’t know, I did not go out but sent my people.’

He and I walked out on the plain just near the camp. There were three dead bodies with the flesh carved off from the waist down.

‘Why are they carved so, only leaving the bones?’ I asked.

‘My people ate them,’ he answered promptly. He then explained, ‘The men who have young children do not eat people, but all the rest ate them.’ On the left was a big man, shot in the back and without a head. (All these corpses were nude.)

‘Where is the man’s head?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they made a bowl of the forehead to rub up tobacco and diamba in.’

We continued to walk and examine until late in the afternoon, and counted forty-one bodies. The rest had been eaten up by the people.

On returning to the camp, we crossed a young woman, shot in the back of the head, one hand was cut away. I asked why, and Mulunba N’Cusa explained that they always cut off the right hand to give to the State on their return.

‘Can you not show me some of the hands?’ I asked.

So he conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands—I counted them, eighty-one in all.

There were not less than sixty women (Bena Pianga) prisoners. I saw them.

We all say that we have as fully as possible investigated the whole outrage, and find it was a plan previously made to get all the stuff possible and to catch and kill the poor people in the ‘death-trap.’”

_Another_ detail, as we see!—cannibalism. They report cases of it with a most offensive frequency. My traducers do not forget to remark that, inasmuch as I am absolute and with a word can prevent in the Congo anything I choose to prevent, then whatsoever is done there by my permission is my act, my _personal_ act; that _I_ do it; that the hand of my agent is as truly my hand as if it were attached to my own arm; and so they picture me in my robes of state, with my crown on my head, munching human flesh, saying grace, mumbling thanks to Him from whom all good things come. Dear, dear, when the soft-hearts get hold of a thing like that missionary’s contribution they quite lose their tranquility over it. They speak out profanely and reproach Heaven for allowing such a fiend to live. Meaning me. They think it irregular. They go shuddering around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from 25,000,000 to 15,000,000 in the twenty years of my administration; then they burst out and call me “the King with Ten Million Murders on his Soul.” They call me a “record.” The most of them do not stop with charging merely the 10,000,000 against me. No, they reflect that but for me the population, by natural increase, would now be 30,000,000, so they charge another 5,000,000 against me and make my total death-harvest 15,000,000. They remark that the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg was responsible for the eggs she would subsequently have laid if she had been let alone. Oh, yes, they call me a “record.” They remark that twice in a generation, in India, the Great Famine destroys 2,000,000 out of a population of 320,000,000, and the whole world holds up its hands in pity and horror; then they fall to wondering where the world would find room for its emotions if I had a chance to trade places with the Great Famine for twenty years! The idea fires their fancy, and they go on and imagine the Famine coming in state at the end of the twenty years and prostrating itself before me, saying: “Teach me, Lord, I perceive that I am but an apprentice.” And next they imagine Death coming, with his scythe and hour-glass, and begging me to marry his daughter and reorganize his plant and run the business. For the whole world, you see! By this time their diseased minds are under full steam, and they get down their books and expand their labors, with me for text. They hunt through all biography for my match, working Attila, Torquemada, Ghengis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, and the rest of that crowd for all they are worth, and evilly exulting when they cannot find it. Then they examine the historical earthquakes and cyclones and blizzards and cataclysms and volcanic eruptions: verdict, none of them “in it” with me. At last they do really hit it (as they think), and they close their labors with conceding—reluctantly—that I have _one_ match in history, but only one—the _Flood_. This is intemperate.

But they are always that, when they think of me. They can no more keep quiet when my name is mentioned than can a glass of water control its feelings with a seidlitz powder in its bowels. The bizarre things they can imagine, with me for an inspiration! One Englishman offers to give me the odds of three to one and bet me anything I like, up to 20,000 guineas, that for 2,000,000 years I am going to be the most conspicuous foreigner in hell. The man is so beside himself with anger that he does not perceive that the idea is foolish. Foolish and unbusinesslike: you see, there could be no winner; both of us would be losers, on account of the loss of interest on the stakes; at four or five per cent. compounded, this would amount to—I do not know how much, exactly, but, by the time the term was up and the bet payable, a person could buy hell itself with the accumulation.

Another madman wants to construct a memorial for the perpetuation of my name, out of my 15,000,000 skulls and skeletons, and is full of vindictive enthusiasm over his strange project. He has it all ciphered out and drawn to scale. Out of the skulls he will build a combined monument and mausoleum to me which shall exactly duplicate the Great Pyramid of Cheops, whose base covers thirteen acres, and whose apex is 451 feet above ground. He desires to stuff me and stand me up in the sky on that apex, robed and crowned, with my “pirate flag” in one hand and a butcher-knife and pendant handcuffs in the other. He will build the pyramid in the centre of a depopulated tract, a brooding solitude covered with weeds and the mouldering ruins of burned villages, where the spirits of the starved and murdered dead will voice their laments forever in the whispers of the wandering winds. Radiating from the pyramid, like the spokes of a wheel, there are to be forty grand avenues of approach, each thirty-five miles long, and each fenced on both sides by skull-less skeletons standing a yard and a half apart and festooned together in line by short chains stretching from wrist to wrist and attached to tried and true old handcuffs stamped with my private trade-mark, a crucifix and butcher-knife crossed, with motto, “By this sign we prosper;” each osseous fence to consist of 200,000 skeletons on a side, which is 400,000 to each avenue. It is remarked with satisfaction that it aggregates three or four thousand miles (single-ranked) of skeletons,—15,000,000 all told—and would stretch across America from New York to San Francisco. It is remarked further, in the hopeful tone of a railroad company forecasting showy extensions of its mileage, that my output is 500,000 corpses a year when my plant is running full time, and that therefore if I am spared ten years longer there will be fresh skulls enough to add 175 feet to the pyramid, making it by a long way the loftiest architectural construction on the earth, and fresh skeletons enough to continue the transcontinental file (on piles) a thousand miles into the Pacific. The cost of gathering the materials from my “widely scattered and innumerable private graveyards,” and transporting them, and building the monument and the radiating grand avenues, is duly ciphered out, running into an aggregate of millions of guineas, and then—why then, (—— ——!! —— ——!!) this idiot asks me to _furnish the money!_ [_Sudden and effusive application of the crucifix_] He reminds me that my yearly income from the Congo is millions of guineas, and that “_only_” 5,000,000 would be required for his enterprise. Every day wild attempts are made upon my purse; they do not affect me, they cost me not a thought. But _this one_—this one troubles me, makes me nervous; for there is no telling what an unhinged creature like this may think of next.... _If he should think of Carnegie_—but I must banish that thought out of my mind! it worries my days; it troubles my sleep. That way lies madness. [_After a pause_] There is no other way—I have got to buy Carnegie.

[_Harrassed and muttering, walks the floor a while, then takes to the Consul’s chapter-headings again. Reads_]

“Government starved a woman’s children to death and killed her sons.”

“Butchery of women and children.”

“_The native has been converted into a being without ambition because without hope._”

“Women chained by the neck by rubber sentries.”

“Women refuse to bear children because, with a baby to carry, they cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers.”

“Statement of a child. ‘I, my mother, my grandmother and my sister, we ran away into the bush. A great number of our people were killed by the soldiers.... After that they saw a little bit of my mother’s head, and the soldiers ran quickly to where we were and caught my grandmother, my mother, my sister and another little one younger than us. Each wanted my mother for a wife, and argued about it, so they finally decided to kill her. They shot her through the stomach with a gun and she fell, and when I saw that I cried very much, because they killed my grandmother and mother and I was left alone. I saw it all done!’”

It has a sort of pitiful sound, although they are only blacks. It carries me back and back into the past, to when my children were little, and would fly—to the bush, so to speak—when they saw me coming.... [_Resumes the reading of chapter-headings of the Consul’s report_]

“They put a knife through a child’s stomach.”

“They cut off the hands and brought them to C. D. (white officer) and spread them out in a row for him to see. They left them lying there, because the white man had seen them, so they did not need to take them to P.”

“Captured children left in the bush to die, by the soldiers.”

“Friends came to ransom a captured girl; but sentry refused, saying the white man wanted her because she was young.”

“Extract from a native girl’s testimony. ‘On our way the soldiers saw a little child, and when they went to kill it the child laughed, so the soldier took the butt of his gun and struck the child with it and then cut off its head. One day they killed my half-sister and cut off her head, hands and feet, because she had bangles on. Then they caught another sister, and sold her to the W. W. people, and now she is a slave there.’”

The little child laughed! [_A long pause. Musing_] That innocent creature. Somehow—I wish it had not laughed. [_Reads_]

“Mutilated children.”

“Government encouragement of inter-tribal slave-traffic. The monstrous fines levied upon villages tardy in their supplies of foodstuffs compel the natives to sell their fellows—and children—to other tribes in order to meet the fine.”

“A father and mother forced to sell their little boy.”

“Widow forced to sell her little girl.”

[_Irritated_] Hang the monotonous grumbler, what would he have me do! Let a widow off merely because she is a widow? He knows quite well that there is nothing much left, now, _but_ widows. I have nothing against widows, as a class, but business is business, and I’ve got to live, haven’t I, even if it does cause inconvenience to somebody here and there? [_Reads_]

“Men intimidated by the torture of their wives and daughters. (To make the men furnish rubber and supplies and so get their captured women released from chains and detention.) The sentry explained to me that he caught the women and brought them in (chained together neck to neck) by direction of his employer.”

“An agent explained that he was forced to catch women in preference to men, as then the men brought in supplies quicker; but he did not explain how the children deprived of their parents obtained their own food supplies.”

“A file of 15 (captured) women.”

“Allowing women and children to die of starvation in prison.”

[_Musing_] Death from _hunger_. A lingering, long misery that must be. Days and days, and still days and days, the forces of the body failing, dribbling away, little by little—yes, it must be the hardest death of all. And to see food carried by, every day, and you can have none of it! Of course the little children cry for it, and that wrings the mother’s heart.... [_A sigh_] Ah, well, it cannot be helped; circumstances make this discipline necessary. [_Reads_]

“The crucifying of sixty women!”

How stupid, how tactless! Christendom’s goose flesh will rise with horror at the news. “Profanation of the sacred emblem!” That is what Christendom will shout. Yes, Christendom will buzz. It can hear me charged with half a million murders a year for twenty years and keep its composure, but to profane the Symbol is quite another matter. It will regard this as serious. It will wake up and want to look into my record. Buzz? Indeed it will; I seem to hear the distant hum already.... It was wrong to crucify the women, clearly wrong, manifestly wrong, I can see it now, myself, and am sorry it happened, sincerely sorry. I believe it would have answered just as well to skin them.... [_With a sigh_] But none of us thought of that; one cannot think of everything; and after all it is but human to err.

It will make a stir, it surely will, these crucifixions. Persons will begin to ask again, as now and then in times past, how I can hope to win and keep the respect of the human race if I continue to give up my life to murder and pillage. [_Scornfully_] When have they heard me say I wanted the respect of the human race? Do they confuse me with the common herd? do they forget that I am a king? What king has valued the respect of the human race? I mean deep down in his private heart. If they would reflect, they would know that it is impossible that a king should value the respect of the human race. He stands upon an eminence and looks out over the world and sees multitudes of meek human things worshiping the persons, and submitting to the oppressions and exactions, of a dozen human things who are in no way better or finer than themselves—made on just their own pattern, in fact, and out of the same quality of mud. When it _talks_, it is a race of whales; but a king knows it for a race of tadpoles. Its history gives it away. If men were really _men_, how could a Czar be possible? and how could I be possible? But we _are_ possible; we are quite safe; and with God’s help we shall continue the business at the old stand. It will be found that the race will put up with us, in its docile immemorial way. It may pull a wry face now and then, and make large talk, but it will stay on its knees all the same.

Making large talk is one of its specialties. It works itself up, and froths at the mouth, and just when you think it is going to throw a brick,—it heaves a poem! Lord, what a race it is!

A CZAR—1905

“A pasteboard autocrat; a despot out of date; A fading planet in the glare of day; A flickering candle in the bright sun’s ray, Burnt to the socket; fruit left too late, High on a blighted bough, ripe till it’s rotten.

By God forsaken and by time forgotten, Watching the crumbling edges of his lands, A spineless god to whom dumb millions pray, From Finland in the West to far Cathay, Lord of a frost-bound continent he stands, Her seeming ruin his dim mind appalls, And in the frozen stupor of his sleep He hears dull thunders, pealing as she falls, And mighty fragments dropping in the deep.”[2]

Footnote 2:

B. H. Nadal, in _New York Times_.

It is fine, one is obliged to concede it; it is a great picture, and impressive. The mongrel handles his pen well. Still, with opportunity, I would cruci—flay him.... “A spineless god.” It is the Czar to a dot—a god, and spineless; a royal invertebrate, poor lad; soft-hearted and out of place. “A spineless god _to whom dumb millions pray_.” Remorselessly correct; concise, too, and compact—the soul and spirit of the human race compressed into half a sentence. On their knees—140,000,000. On their knees to a little tin deity. Massed together, they would stretch away, and away, and away, across the plains, fading and dimming and failing in a measureless perspective—why, even the telescope’s vision could not reach to the final frontier of that continental spread of human servility. Now _why_ should a king value the respect of the human race? It is quite unreasonable to expect it. A curious race, certainly! It finds fault with me and with my occupations, and forgets that neither of us could exist an hour without its sanction. It is our confederate and all-powerful protector. It is our bulwark, our friend, our fortress. For this it has our gratitude, our deep and honest gratitude—but not our respect. Let it snivel and fret and grumble if it likes; that is all right; we do not mind that.

[_Turns over leaves of a scrapbook, pausing now and then to read a clipping and make a comment_] The poets—how they do hunt that poor Czar! French, Germans, English, Americans—they all have a bark at him. The finest and capablest of the pack, and the fiercest, are Swilburne (English, I think), and a pair of Americans, Thomas Bailey Eldridge and Colonel Richard Waterson Gilder, of the sentimental periodical called _Century Magazine and Louisville Courier-Journal_. They certainly have uttered some very strong yelps. I can’t seem to find them—I must have mislaid them.... If a poet’s bite were as terrible as his bark, why dear me—but it isn’t. A wise king minds neither of them; but the poet doesn’t know it. It’s a case of little dog and lightning express. When the Czar goes thundering by, the poet skips out and rages alongside for a little distance, then returns to his kennel wagging his head with satisfaction, and thinks he has inflicted a memorable scare, whereas nothing has really happened—the Czar didn’t know he was around. They never bark at me; I wonder why that is. I suppose my Corruption-Department buys them. That must be it, for certainly I ought to inspire a bark or two; I’m rather choice material, I should say. Why—here _is_ a yelp at me. [_Mumbling a poem_]

“... What gives thee holy right to murder hope And water ignorance with human blood?

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