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 only comply with the demands made on them for rubber by utilising the labour of the women and children. In consequence, their huts are falling to ruin, their fields are uncultivated, and the people are short of food … and dying off … This district was formerly rich in corn, millet, and other food-stuffs … now it is almost a desert.

This passage—and hundreds of others of a similar kind could be quoted from every part of the Congo—illustrates what has been, perhaps, the most fertile cause of depopulation, both in the Congo Free State, and in the French Congo (see next chapter): i.e., depopulation by starvation. That, and the colossal infant mortality induced by the well-nigh inconceivable conditions to which native life was reduced in the Congo, far exceeded the actual massacres as determining factors in the disappearance of these people.

The above are but a few examples selected, more or less haphazard, of the Leopoldian "System" in its actual working. A similar system must yield similar results wherever it is enforced. If, for instance, the desires openly expressed by certain influential persons in this country were acceded to, viz.: that the oil-palm forests of Nigeria, which are of infinitely greater value than were the rubber forests of the Congo, should be declared the property of the British State; that the native population should be dispossessed of its ownership in those forests and of the oil and kernels which its labour produces from them, should be forbidden to sell their products to the European at their market value as it does at present and has for generations, and should be required to gather and prepare them as a "tax" demanded by the usurping and expropriating alien Government; precisely the same results would ensue. Nigeria would become another Congo. You cannot steal the land of the natives of tropical Africa, degrade them from the position of agriculturists and arboriculturists in their own right, lay claim to possession of their actual and potential wealth, destroy their purchasing power, deny them the right to buy and sell by denying their ownership in the natural or cultivated products of their own country, which their labour alone can make accessible to the outer world, and impose upon them the duty of harvesting their products for you as a "tax." You cannot do this, and thereby convert them into slaves of European capitalism, without the use