by them, the rubber becoming the property of the state and the bonus being the greater the less the cost of the rubber. A similar bonus was given on ivory and gum copal. This was a direct stimulus towards extortion on the part of the officials. Villages were taxed for a certain amount of rubber, and if it was not forthcoming punishments of all kinds were inflicted, a common one being the cutting off of hands, another, the carrying off of the women as hostages.
Such a feeling was aroused in Europe by reports from missionaries and others of the atrocities, that King Leopold was compelled to appoint a commission of enquiry, which reported in 1905 or early 1906. This report tells that the native peoples are "exhausted" through the demand made upon them for head-carriage in the transport of government material and that they are threatened with partial destruction. Captain Baccari, envoy of the King of Italy, traveled through that region and says, "we have all the ghastly scenes of the slave trade, the collar, the lash, and the pressgang." A lieutenant in the Italian army who spent three years in the Congo Free State and served in Leopold's African army writes:
The caravan road between Kasongo and Tanganyika is strewn with corpses of carriers, exactly as in the time of the Arab slave trade. The carriers, weakened, ill, insufficiently fed, fall literally by hundreds; and, in the evening, when there happens to be a little wind, the odor of bodies in decomposition is everywhere noticeable, to such an extent, indeed, that the Italian officiers have given it a name "Manyema perfume."
The commission reports that the direct causes of the miseries of the natives are the requisitions in rubber and the requisitions in staple food supplies "everywhere on the Congo, and, notwithstanding certain appearances to the contrary, the native gathers india rubber only under the influence of direct or indirect force." It indicates what is meant by force, namely, indiscriminate massacre, settlement of soldiers in rubberproducing villages, uncontrolled and unhampered in the execution of their instructions, taking of hostages, imprisonment of women and children, flogging, illegal fines and punishments and so on. The condition of the rubber gatherer is described:
In the majority of cases he must, every fortnight, go one or two days' journey and. sometimes more, to reach the place in the forest where he can find in fair abundance the rubber vine. There the gatherer passes some days in a miserable existence. He must construct an improvised shelter which can not obviously replace his hut; he has not the food to which he is accustomed; he is deprived of his wife, exposed to the inclemencies of the weather and to the attacks of wild beasts. He must take his harvest to the station of the government or the company, and it is only after that that he returns to his village, where he can barely reside two or three days before a new demand is made upon him.
This is taken from the report of King Leopold's own commission, which naturally does not overstate the case. I could easily have quoted
