Our Governor-General has the power to authorise the admission, after this date, of demands for registration, which for some exceptional reason could not be presented within the prescribed time. * * * * * ARTICLE 8. The manner in which requests for registration will be controlled shall be settled by Our Governor-General. When a non-native shall have duly proved his rights over a portion of land, the Recorder of Deeds shall give him a registration certificate which shall constitute a legal title of occupation until such time as the land system has been definitely settled in the Congo Free State. Under this decree, practically every land claim presented was admitted by the Government. Further decrees provided for the compulsory measurement of land held by private owners; the Torrens Act system of transferring the title to land was adopted; rules of survey and its certification were prescribed; deeds were registered at the office of a Registrar, and generally the complete and practical machinery of an efficient Land Department was established for the benefit of natives and foreigners alike. As the State progressed in its organisation it defined its earlier improvisations with greater precision, provided laws in regulation of native “occupations,” private lands and the lands of the State. Its respect for the equities in property of those who had hazarded life in that wild region extended also to a scrupulous care for the native whose lands it guarded from invasion and trespass. By decree dated September 14, 1886, the State provided that “Lands occupied by native populations under the authority of their chiefs shall continue to be governed by local customs and uses,” thus insuring aboriginal tranquillity in the presence of a scheme of civilisation which the administrators of the State wisely refrained from imposing with disturbing rigour. The savage black man at first instinctively shrinks from the civilised white, and the Belgians, with knowledge of this almost universal timidity of the African races, offered him a mild measure of civilising rule as distinguished from the bluff and peremptory subjugation which has always characterised the decimating colonial methods of its burly neighbour in the Uganda and Soudan countries. By the same decree the Government of the Congo State provided that: All acts or agreements which might tend to expel the natives from the territories occupied by them or to deprive them directly or indirectly of their freedom or means of subsistence, are forbidden. Where natives occupy, or have moved upon, lands which it is sought to lease from the State, provision has been made by the decree of April 9, 1893, that: