It is quite permissible ethically for the French, the British or any other government to take possession of some thoroughly backward or very sparsely populated country in a more or less savage condition, and rule that country impartially for its own benefit and for its general usefulness to humanity at large. Under such conditions they certainly are not obliged by any moral law to attribute to the nearest native community of savages some large area of uninhabited forest or metalliferous rock. Such a source of future wealth they are entitled to administer as a trustee might deal with an estate for the benefit of a minor or of an imbecile; but only on the condition of putting the profits derived therefrom into the treasury of the state or country thus administered, not into the funds, private or public, of a distant European nation. King Leopold II or the French Republic were quite justified in declaring the uninhabited, unexploited, uncultivated forests of French and Belgian Congo to be “State domains”; but not with the sole purpose in the one case of swelling the revenues of his own privy purse, and in the other of enriching political partisans or public servants. The wealth of these regions need not have gone to some native chief or tribe dwelling in the vicinity who had had nothing whatever to do with the getting of the wealth, but should have been attributed to the whole community of the state or colony in which these forest or mining areas were situated. Another grave defect in the earlier administration of French Congo was the handing over of thousands of natives as veritable serfs of the glebe to these European concessionaires. This was a wicked return for the trust they had placed in envoys of France like De Brazza, who had obtained their adherence to French dominion by treaty. The result of this policy was that gross abuses ensued, followed by native risings. At length the French Government was constrained by European opinion (largely awakened by Mr E. D. Morel) to look into the affairs of French Congo; and in 1905 the virtual creator of this dominion, De Brazza, was sent out as a commissioner to investigate the charges brought against the officials and the concessionaires. It is believed that De Brazza was horrified at much of the devastation and depopulation which he saw, as were some other high-minded French officials who had the courage to publish their impressions. But De Brazza died at Dakar on his way home, and his report was never published, though the French Government made afterwards some changes in matters of administration.