sult of this system was that in seven years the natives
condemned to slavery in the rubber forests brought in rubber to the
amount of fifty-five millions of dollars. But its chief results were
the destruction of entire villages, the flight from their homes in
the Congo of hundreds of thousands of natives, and for those that
remained misery, death, the most brutal tortures and degradations,
unprintable, unthinkable.

I am not going to enter into the question of the atrocities. In the
Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
"close up" the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
sight of men, all things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
that of the Abolitionists.

Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
along the river. T