market-place; a man who has worn out his
friends--and his clothes. A man without hope.

One would think for the work in hand they would choose the greatest
blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence.
Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another
thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of
too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that.
It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the
penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without
hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.

Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of
going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months
at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and
easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new
servitude.

This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo
administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he
had to extract from the people round about.

Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous
proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by
Secretary of State Van Estvelde.

The Bonus Proclamation.

According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his
pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract
from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his
bonus would be.

Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost
of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen
centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the
natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or
copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, and
so on.

The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid for it. And those were
the terms on which he had to trade with the natives.

Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring in huge quantities of
wax and copal for nothing, just as a tax owing to the State, a tax to the
Government that was plundering and exploiting them.

Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell into this state of
things as easily as a billiard ball falls into a pocket when skilfully
directed.

The unfortun