them to an organised system; that the French Congo has never witnessed a whole public or private enterprise having recourse as a principle, in order to maintain itself in being (pour subsister) or to hasten its success, to proceedings of methodical tyranny, analogous to those emploved in the portion of the Congo State actually forming the object of investigation.
The policy which dictated these instructions and the investigating mission confided to De Brazza, was clear enough. In the first place the revelations of what was taking place in the French Congo had caused so great a stir that there was no option but to order an inquiry, and to appoint a man to carry it out, whose integrity was universally acknowledged and whose reputation was international. In the second place the French Government had reason to believe that the Balfour-Lansdowne Government would not be able to resist the growing national demand for an international Conference into the affairs of the Congo Free State, and intended to press for such a conference which Lord Lansdowne had suggested in his circular Note to the signatory Powers. French Ministers were prepared to fall in with the British request, the more so as French diplomacy had been quietly working for several years for an international partition of the Congo Free State. But, if such a conference were held, it was indispensable that the French Government should be in a position to go into it with clean hands, vouched for as clean by a man of De Brazza's international standing. The French politicians then in office calculated, perhaps, that De Brazza would play the politico-diplomatic game they desired him to play. But De Brazza was determined to get at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. His principal biographer on that memorable inquiry, M. Felicien Challaye, has recorded that "De Brazza felt a great personal responsibility weighing upon him." It was due to his influence that these millions of African natives had accepted French "protection." It was his manifest duty to secure justice and redress for them, if injustice had been inflicted.
In his very first reports from the French Congo, De Brazza made the Government understand that he could not do what was demanded of him in the secret instructions. He was driven to the painful necessity of telling his Government that the conditions he found in the French Congo could not be explained by individual actions of an atrocious character, but were due to the "System"
