purposes of trade or to
cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
no protection.

The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent
of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
beneath his eyes.

[Illustration: The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking,
Is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.]

You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenco Marquez too necessary to
her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she