hide, by torture--so much greater his fortune, so much richer
Leopold.

[Illustration: A Village on the Kasai River.]

Few schemes devised have been more cynical, more devilish, more
cunningly designed to incite a man to cruelty and abuse. To
dishonesty it was an invitation and a reward. It was this system of
"payment by results," evolved by Leopold sooner than allow his
agents a fixed and sufficient wage, that led to the atrocities.

One result 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,