Press Opinions on 



The Curse of Central Africa. 



"It would be affectation to deny that the appearance of the 

 present volume has not been awaited with considerable interest 

 and curiosity by the increasing numbers of people in this 

 country who have become painfully sensitive on the subject of 

 our national responsibility for the existence, and consequently 

 for the actions of the Congo Free State. For some years past, 

 charges more or less definite have been made against the 

 officials of the local administration in Africa, involving not 

 merely an utter disregard of the rights of property of the 

 natives, but the most callous and inhuman contempt for Hfe. 

 The higher officials, both on the Congo and in Brussels, have 

 been charged with complicity in the crimes of their subordinates, 

 partly by reason of their neglect to detect and punish the 

 atrocities committed by their agents, and partly because these 

 crimes are, it is alleged, the direct and necessary result of the 

 policy adopted and sanctioned by the State for the exploitation 

 of the natural products of the country. To these charges the 

 official answer has been a general denial of their accuracy, 

 with a plea that it is impossible altogether to avoid misconduct 

 on the part of agents serving under peculiarly trying conditions, 

 remote from the central authority, and therefore difficult to 

 control ; but that wherever specific acts of misconduct have 

 been brought home to any particular officer, steps have at once 

 been taken to bring him to trial, and that when he has been 

 found guilty he has been punished with the utmost severity. 

 It has further been the custom of the Free State and its 

 apologists to weaken the effect of the charges brought against 

 it by suggesting that when made by former officials they are 

 advanced for interested motives. The volume published to-day 

 is the joint work of a former officer in the British Army who 

 was, for two periods of three years each, in the service 

 of the Free State, and of an American citizen who was 

 also at one time in the service of the State, and subse- 

 quently revisited the Congo as an agent of one of the com- 

 mercial companies in which the State authorities hold half the 

 share capital. We gather, however, from a long introduction 

 signed by Mr. J. G. Leigh, that the writer of the introduction 

 has had a considerable share in the production of the volume, 

 which, unfortunately, bears signs of its composite authorship. 

 On a cursory examination, at least, we have not found it 

 always easy to distinguish whether it is Captain Burrows or 

 Mr. Canisius who is the narrator, due, probably, to defective 



14 



