owned, and the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are owned by
one man. The land and its people are his private property. I am not
trying to say that he governs the Congo. He does govern it, but that
in itself would not be of interest. His claim is that he owns it.
Though backed by all the mailed fists in the German Empire, and all
the _Dreadnoughts_ of the seas, no other modern monarch would make
such a claim. It does not sound like anything we have heard since
the days and the ways of Pharaoh. And the most remarkable feature of
it is, that the man who makes this claim is the man who was placed
over the Congo as a guardian, to keep it open to the trade of the
world, to suppress slavery. That, in the Congo, he has killed trade
and made the products of the land his own, that of the natives he
did not kill he has made slaves, is what to-day gives the Congo its
chief interest. It is well to emphasize how this one man stole a
march on fourteen Powers, including the United States, and stole
also an empire of one million square miles.

Twenty-five years ago all of Africa was divided into many parts. The
part which still remained to be distributed among the Powers was
that which was watered by the Congo River and its tributaries.

Along the north bank of the Congo River ran the French Congo; the
Portuguese owned the lands to the south, and on the east it was shut
in by protectorates and colonies of Germany and England. It was, and
is, a territory as large, were Spain and Russia omitted, as Europe.
Were a map of the Congo laid upon a map of Europe, with the mouth of
the Congo River where France and Spain meet at Biarritz, the
boundaries of the Congo would reach south to the heel of Italy, to
Greece, to Smyrna; east to Constantinople and Odessa; northeast to
St. Petersburg and Finland, and northwest to the extreme limits of