onaires
have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
Congo hell is assured."

The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
to assist those less fortunate than themselves.

For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
fairness.

"Why should you suppose," Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, "that in
the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the
Congo we are not going to spoil our record."

I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
Guggenheim answered that "Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
dictate how we shall treat the native labor," that if his agents
were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
they accepted that responsibility.

But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
into trouble, men of whose _dossiers_ he is quite ignorant.

From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
of his "valets du roi," press agents, and tools, men who for years
have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by