The real difficulty is that few Belgians seem capable of thinking anything beyond rubber on the one hand, and the native as a servile labourer on the other. Colonial opinion in Belgium and on the Congo itself appears to be firmly wedded to this restricted view of colonial expansion. This circumscribed vision can comprehend the serf, the labourer, or the domestic slave, but the free, industrious and successful coloured citizen, carving out an economic future, in which the State can indirectly share, is apparently beyond the mental horizon of most of those who at present control the destinies of the Congo tribes. True statecraft would have placed a halo round Annexation Day, making it one of great rejoicing throughout the Congo by declaring that through the action of a generous Administration rubber collecting by the State would from that date cease for all time. But through lack of colonial imagination this great opportunity for regaining the confidence of the native tribes was thrown away, and the Administration rehoisted the old Congo State flag with a miniature Belgian flag relegated to the corner, at the same time letting it be known that upon rubber production—the synonym of horror to the native mind—the future would depend. The failure of the rubber cultivation enterprise is complete. Whatever the man in the street may think, the Belgian Government knows that Monsieur Renkin’s scheme for relieving the Belgian Exchequer has utterly failed. The twenty to thirty millions of _productive_ rubber trees dangled before the eyes of the Belgian tax-payer exist only on paper. Cotton has been proposed, but what possibilities has cotton cultivation, not only in the Congo but anywhere in West Africa, where it comes into competition with cocoa or palm oil? Cotton requires that the worker should toil under the fierce rays of a tropical sun; it demands constant attention if it is to be kept free from weeds and undergrowth, and when the harvest is gathered the native can never receive the financial reward which attaches to palm oil and kernels or to cocoa. In a crude way the West African is a careful mathematician, and though in his primitive condition he knows nothing about square yards, acres and compound interest, he can soon tell what products he can grow most profitably on a given piece of ground—and cotton is not one of them. [Sidenote: CONGO POSSIBILITIES]