The Congo demands large financial aid from the Mother country. This is a fact which has never been realized by the ordinary Belgian—and he might object if he knew. Even the British subject, whose colonial conception has grown with him from childhood, has very little idea of the large sums of money which are found by Great Britain towards aiding her Crown colonies along the path of progress. Belgium cannot expect to run the Congo successfully without large drafts from her home Exchequer; her colony, measuring nearly a million square miles, will require at the very least a million pounds sterling per annum for twenty years. Belgium can beyond question find that sum of money, providing her people are prepared to share the black man’s burden which their late Sovereign made so heavy. The difficulty, however, is that King Leopold and his entourage made such prodigious fortunes that the Belgian people have always regarded the Congo as a veritable El Dorado. The Belgian colonial authorities reiterated again and again, until quite a recent date, that the Congo would never involve the nation in financial sacrifices. Couple this impression, so wickedly fostered by politicians who should have known better, with the fact that the Belgian has no colonial conception, and the reader will agree that any statesman will have a difficult task in persuading the Belgian nation to make large and continuous grants from the Home Exchequer. [Sidenote: BRITISH COLONIAL CONCEPTION] The British conception rests upon a profound belief in the old scriptural paradox: “He that loseth his life will save it.” The Colonial Office in Downing Street does not, like its sister bureau—the Foreign Office—display texts of scripture on its ceilings, and the Colonial Secretaries might not in this material age admit scriptural guidance in Imperial affairs, but woven into the fibre of our administration is a basis of Christian philosophy which, though it admits occasional incidents of a regrettable nature, yet pursues in the long run the straight course of sacrificing men and money for backward nations and countries, quite regardless of consequences. The cynic will say, “Yes, with the certainty that the goose well cared for will lay golden eggs.” Certainly, but that is part of the Divine contract for pursuing that which is right. This, however, is what few Belgians understand—or any other colonial Power for that matter—but it is part and parcel of colonial statecraft without which tropical colonies at least can never be a success.