The Crime of the Congo

Excerpt: ...have been just as hard, have proved less profitable in its yield of rubber, the local prison would have seen them. The people everywhere assured me that they were not happy under this system, and it was apparent to a callous eye that in this they spoke the strict truth.? Again I insert a passage to show that Casement was by no means an ill-natured critic: ?It is only right to say that the present agent of the A.B.I.R. Society I met at Bongandanga seemed to me to try, in very difficult and embarrassing circumstances, to minimize as far as possible, and within the limits of his duties, the evils of the system I there observed at work.? Speaking of the Mongalla massacres-those in which Lothaire was implicated-he quotes from the judgment of the Court of Appeal: ?That it is just to take into account that, by the correspondence produced in the case, the chiefs of the Concession Company have, if not by formal orders, at least by their example and their tolerance, induced their agents to take no account whatever of the rights, property, and lives of the natives; to use the arms and the soldiers which should have served for their defence and the maintenance of order to force the natives to furnish them with produce and to work for the Company, as also to pursue as rebels and outlaws those who sought to escape from the requisitions imposed upon them. That, above all, the fact that the arrest of women and their detention, to compel the villages to furnish both produce and workmen, was tolerated and admitted even by certain of the administrative authorities of the region.? Yet another example of the workings of the system: ?In the morning, when about to start for K--, many people from the surrounding country came in to see me. They brought Pg 63 with them three individuals who had been shockingly wounded by gun fire, two men and a very small boy, not more than six years of age, and a fourth-a...