One of my sorrowing critics observes: “Other Christian rulers tax their people, but furnish schools, courts of law, roads, light, water and protection to life and limb in return; King Leopold taxes his stolen nation, but provides _nothing in return but hunger, terror, grief, shame, captivity, mutilation and massacre_.” That is their style! I furnish “nothing”! I send the gospel to the survivors; these censure-mongers know it, but they would rather have their tongues cut out than mention it. I have several times required my raiders to give the dying an opportunity to kiss the sacred emblem; and if they obeyed me I have without doubt been the humble means of saving many souls. None of my traducers have had the fairness to mention this; but let it pass; there is One who has not overlooked it, and that is my solace, that is my consolation. [_Puts down the Report, takes up a pamphlet, glances along the middle of it_] This is where the “death-trap” comes in. Meddlesome missionary spying around—Rev. W. H. Sheppard. Talks with a black raider of mine after a raid; cozens him into giving away some particulars. The raider remarks: “‘I demanded 30 slaves from this side of the stream and 30 from the other side; 2 points of ivory, 2,500 balls of rubber, 13 goats, 10 fowls and 6 dogs, some corn chumy, etc.’ ‘How did the fight come up?’ I asked. ‘I sent for all their chiefs, sub-chiefs, men and women, to come on a certain day, saying that I was going to finish all the palaver. When they entered these small gates (the walls being made of fences brought from other villages, the high native ones) I demanded all my pay or I would kill them; so they refused to pay me, and I ordered the fence to be closed so they couldn’t run away; then we killed them here inside the fence. The panels of the fence fell down and some escaped.’ ‘How many did you kill?’ I asked. ‘We killed plenty, will you see some of them?’ That was just what I wanted. He said: ‘I think we have killed between eighty and ninety, and those in the other villages I don’t know, I did not go out but sent my people.’ He and I walked out on the plain just near the camp. There were three dead bodies with the flesh carved off from the waist down. ‘Why are they carved so, only leaving the bones?’ I asked. ‘My people ate them,’ he answered promptly. He then explained, ‘The men who have young children do not eat people, but all the rest ate them.’ On the left was a big man, shot in the back and without a head. (All these corpses were nude.) ‘Where is the man’s head?’ I asked. ‘Oh, they made a bowl of the forehead to rub up tobacco and diamba in.’ We continued to walk and examine until late in the afternoon, and counted forty-one bodies. The rest had been eaten up by the people.