the two has tended to obscure issues which are perfectly simple and defined. People who feel strongly in regard to certan forms which trade has assumed in some parts of Africa—the trade in liquor for instance—or who are impressed with the injustice which an African population may suffer in the lowering of the purchase price of African produce by rings and combines on the part of European firms buying that produce; are apt to confuse these and similar evils with the principle itself. The operations of trade need constant regulation and supervision; it is the business of the administrator and the legislator to provide them. But the maintenance of trade itself as the economic factor in the relationship between civilised and primitive communities, producers respectively of commodities desired by both, is synonymous with the recognition that the latter are possessed of elementary human rights. If that principle be set aside, slavery, which is a denial of human rights, must in some form or another necessarily take its place.
That is why the framers of the provisions of the Act of Berlin were profoundly wise in putting in the forepart of their program the right of the native peoples of Central Africa to trade, to sell the produce of their soil against imported European merchandise. Recognition that this natural right was inherent in African communities necessarily implied, as has been already pointed out, recognition that African communities have proprietary rights in the land. But the instrument forged at Berlin in 1885 did not explicitly provide for this. It contained no safeguards against expropriation. It made no attempt to define native tenure. This was, perhaps, natural enough. No one could have supposed that a few years later some thirty millions of Africans would be dispossessed by simple decree, of their proprietary rights in a territory almost as large as Europe. Nevertheless the fact that this danger was not foreseen and provided against, proved of great assistance to King Leopold in defending his African policy, on the ground that the right of a "State" to appropriate "vacant" lands was an established principle of jurisprudence; that the natural fruits of the land thus appropriated became de facto the property of the "State," and that no violation of the Act of Berlin had, therefore, occurred.
