d.

To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of
the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each
the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to
gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."

[Illustration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
Tenants.]

This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
background of misery and suffering, for its h