These Americans working together
could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
with two Maxim guns could do it. The "kingdom" of the Congo is only
a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
them.
Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."
To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
King.
What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
possible, a greater evil?
E.
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