show. That power of will and restraint so
remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He
bound his hate with iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from
pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed
not a sign of pain or passion; when the old man committed that last
outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him
before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an
eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it
devoured it and grew.

The spring was poisoned at its source.

That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off
from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.

And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a
spacious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and
fed by an unfailing flood of energy.

The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation of his son, kept
him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.

The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the
devil than any other young man of his time. He passed through the college
of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and
when he had obtained his captaincy.

He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million
francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.

He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics
and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the
Continent of Europe. Politicians and financiers under the guise of
Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of
intellect, who work their political and financial works quite
unobtrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.

Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with
periodic returns to the wilderness.

With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge
chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew
the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the
rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the
great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern;
that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the
work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.

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