Europe, and when, in an evil hour, it was discovered that the Congo was a great natural rubber preserve.
I have emphasised this early commercial intercourse between the peoples of the Congo and their European clients because it is, in a measure, the keynote of the story. M. A. J. Wauters, the foremost Belgian historian of the Congo, wrote about that time:
Trade is the dominant characteristic of all these peoples. They are warriors only for defence, agriculturists only for their own needs. They are not pastoral. They are ons and all traders, and it is trade that will redeem them. They welcome and invite those who promise them protection in order to trade freely and in safety.
It is very difficult for anyone who has not experienced in his person the sensations of the tropical African forest to realise the tremendous handicaps which man has to contend against whose lot is cast beneath its sombre shades; the extent to which nature, there seen in her most, titanic and ruthless moods, presses upon man; the intellectual disabilities against which man must needs constantly struggle not to sink to the level of the brute; the incessant combat to preserve life and secure nourishment. Communities living in this environment who prove themselves capable of systematic agriculture and of industry; who are found to be possessed of keen commercial instincts; who are quick at learning, deft at working iron and copper, able to weave cloths of real artistic design; these are communities full of promise in which the divine spark burns brightly. To destroy these activities; to reduce all the varied, and picturesque, and stimulating episodes in savage life to a dull routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends; to dislocate social ties and disrupt social institutions; to stifle nascent desires and crush mental development; to graft upon primitive passions the annihilating evils of scientific slavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilised man, unrestrained by convention or law; in fine, to kill the soul in a people—this is a crime which transcends physical murder. And this crime it was, which, for twenty dreadful years, white men perpetrated upon the Congo natives.
The Congo man, whom Stanley and the explorers of his epoch revealed to Europe, was "natural man," with natural man's vices and virtues. Europe heard much of the latter and comparatively little of the former until Leopold II., forced to defend the character of his
