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 ." Of 40,000 natives living in one particular region, 20,000 had been "destroyed" in two years. Many quotations were given of typical extracts from officials in the course of punishing native villages which had not furnished a sufficient quantity of rubber to the Concessionaires, or which refused to pay the rubber tax. Here are some of them:

The following passage was quoted from the report of one of the inspectors appointed by De Brazza:

With terrible force the accusers in the Chamber drove home again and again the official circulars of the Governor-General to his officials, notifying them that their promotion would depend upon the measure of their success in increasing the yield of the rubber taxes. They commented upon the close connection between the Concessionaire Companies of the French Congo and the Belgian Congo Free State Companies. They emphasised the sinister influence of the Concessionaire Companies upon successive French Colonial Ministers, illustrating it with such facts as, for instance, that the chef de cabinet of one such Minister had subsequently become the director of six Concessionaire Companies. They asked what conceivable advantage could accrue to France from the prosecution of so atrocious a policy; what was the mysterious influence which permitted a number of financial corporations to impose their will upon a French Colony, making the Administration of it their active accomplices, massacring its inhabitants, ruining the country? They cited more official documents, in which specific