Neither can it be argued, in the case of a railway like that of the Congo, that the contractor should require rates superior to his actual expenses, in order to realise an immediate profit. Clause 16 states “that there shall be collected only tolls calculated on the cost of construction, maintenance, and management, and on the profits due to the promoters.” To argue in the sense indicated would be against the purport of the clause which aims at forbidding _excessive_ rates, but which in no way interferes with a gradual realisation of average profits by the contractors. To arbitrarily forbid the contractor to make such profits would be to fly in the face of Clause 16, inasmuch as it refers to the profits _due_ to the contractor. It is equally fallacious to imagine that because certain merchandise is carried for a time without profit, the rates for certain other merchandise must needs be increased. Finally, it would still have to be shown that the Berlin Act forbids a proper and reasonable equalisation of contractors’ charges. But the Berlin Act does not meddle with such arrangements; it does not establish a detailed and proportional schedule of rates. It only says that such charges must not be excessive—that is to say, they must not exceed the comprehensive amount of the necessary expenses and due profits. The Act, moreover, fixes no maximum for such profits, neither does it fix any maximum rates on produce. Its intentions in this respect are shown by its refusal to define, even by means of a maximum scale, the extent of compensatory rates. [Sidenote: Africa Unknown to Africans.] Time was when the native Congolese, lazily living out his torpid life in a land where Nature in her luxuriance yielded him subsistence without the ennobling concomitant of his labour, avoided the great forests, the jungles, and the marshes of Equatorial Africa. He moved about to regions of easy access where the land afforded his indolence the greatest pleasure for the least responsibility. Explorers and the early builders of the Congo Free State often experienced great difficulty in preventing the desertion of their native carriers over a trackless course, such, for instance, as Stanley, Wissmann, De Brazza, cut out on their several expeditions. In short, the African Negro regarded his feet with such solicitude that he waited for the white man to show him the thickets and the fastnesses which contained those natural resources—rubber, oil, gum, ivory, nuts—which certain library philosophers and untravelled colonisers assert were the conscious property of the savage who neither knew of, nor cared for, their existence. Industry was not worth while to him who could supply his wants in idleness.