were much more lasting than any natural phenomenon. Thriving communities had been transformed into scattered groups of panic-stricken folk: precipitated from active commercial prosperity and industrial life into utter barbarism.
There is not an inhabited village left in four days' steaming through a country formerly so rich: to-day entirely ruined… The villages are compelled to furnish so many kilos of rubber every week… The soldiers sent out to get rubber and ivory are depopulating the country. They find that the quickest and cheapest method is to raid villages, seize prisoners, and have them redeemed afterwards for ivory.
The system thus inaugurated on the river banks was methodically pursued inland. For twenty years fighting became endemic all over the Congo.
••••••
The judicial murder of an English trader by one of King Leopold's officials, the revelations in Captain Hinde's book of the feeding of King Leopold's armed auxiliaries with human flesh, and Glave's diary published in the Century Magazine, first called attention to what was going on." Sir Charles Dilke raised the matter in the House of Commons (1897). The appalling revelations of the Swedish missionary Sjoblöm followed shortly afterwards. He was the first to disclose the practice (which seemed incredible at the time, but was later confirmed from many sources, and conclusively established) started by certain officials, requiring the native soldiers whom they sent out to "punish" recalcitrant villages, to bring in trophies of hands and the sexual organs of males to prove that they had duly performed their work. This mutilation of the dead as a system of check and tally rapidly spread through the rubber districts and developed, as it naturally would do, into the mutilation of the living.
Here are short extracts on this particular theme from a series of letters by the American missionary Mr. Clark, referring to the district in which he laboured:
