And that they did not receive in
money, but in "trade goods," which are worth about ten per cent less
than their money value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents
that is due them, these black boys, who for three months sweated in
the dark jungle cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four
cents. One would dislike to grow rich at that price.
[Illustration: English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges.]
In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
day without "chop," or three and a half francs with "chop." That
is, on one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's
work what Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a
result the natives run away to the French side, and often, I might
almost say invariably, when at the _poste de bois_ on the Congo side
we would find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for
the French boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood.
I took photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in
order to show how they compared--of the French and Belgian wood
posts, the one well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or
playing musical instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on
the Belgian side no wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and
generally shivering with fever. Had the photographs only developed
properly they would have shown much more convincingly than one can
write how utterly miserable is the condition of the Congo negro.
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