forest broken only by the occasional trampling of the elephant and buffalo, the chatter of the white-maned monkeys, the scream of the grey parrot.
The Abir Concessionaire Company, whose managing council included the "Grand Master" of King Leopold's Belgian Court, made a net profit in six years of £720,000 on a paid-up capital of £9,280; and each share of a paid-up value of £4 6s. 6d. received in that period £335 in dividends. This company's shares were at one time freely speculated in at £900 to £1,000 per share. In this area the atrocities, incidental to the "system," attained proportions of Dantesque horror. The company enrolled thousands of natives, armed with rifles and cap-guns, to force the rubber output upon the general population. It kept some 10,000 natives continually at work all the year round collecting rubber, and some 10,000 men, women and children passed every year through its "hostage-houses." All the chiefs were gradually killed off, either outright or by the slower processes of confinement and starvation in the "houses of detention," or by tortures which rival those inflicted upon the plantation slaves in the West Indies. When certain _areas became denuded of rubber, the remaining male population was carried off wholesale under escort and flung into another area not yet exhausted, their women handed over to the soldiers. This is but the bald framework of the picture.
The Concessionaire Company working the Kasai region, whose native peoples, once renowned above any other in the Congo for their "moral and physical beauty" (to quote a Belgian explorer) made a profit of £736,680 in four years on a paid-up capital of £40,200. The value of a single £10 share stood at one time as high as £640. At the time of the annexation (1908) the Kasai was producing 50 per cent, of the rubber from the Congo. Apart altogether from the "atrocities"—murder, mutilation, starvation in hostage houses, floggings to death, and all the horrible concomitants of the "System"—the general condition of the natives in that year, may be estimated from the following extracts from Consul Thesiger's report:
