This report is corroborated by the statistics of the British Gold Coast, which in 1899 exported rubber to the value of £555,731, but in 1902 to the value of only £88,602; Lagos, 1896, £347,721, in 1901, £14,749; Sierra Leone, 1895, £86,940, in 1902, £8,192. Indeed, the table from which these quotations are made shows that the rubber exports from eight British colonies have greatly decreased since 1898, despite the increased European value of that product. It would seem that the care and skill which during these same years caused the Congo exports to rise from less than a million francs in 1886 to over fifty-four millions in 1903 were at least worth the emulation of the Gold Coast, Lagos, and Sierra Leone muddlers hiding defeat behind the humanitarian pretexts of Liverpool rubber merchants and their agents, whose conscience is as flexible as their trade product. Concerning the concessionary scheme which prevails in the French Congo, and which the Congo Free State Government has so successfully carried out in its own territory, M. Eugène Etienne, a distinguished French scholar, Vice-President of the French Chamber of Deputies, and leader of the French colonial group, has said and written some pertinent things. The French Congo, lying on the coast west of the Free State, has been also assailed by the few interested British merchants and their religious and secular agents and reform associations for having been forbidden to trespass upon and despoil Central African territory which has so far escaped the acquisitive proclivities of John Bull. M. Etienne’s dissertation contains the following passages as applicable to the Free State as to the French Congo: [Sidenote: French and Belgian Systems Compared.] I stop in the enumeration of the results obtained by the Independent State of the Congo, and I will not put in the opposite column the balance sheet which gives little enough to rejoice over of the progress realised in the neighbouring French colony. Certainly from the point of view of the exploration of the country, and the management of the natives, our officials have obtained what might be called, in a formula borrowed from mechanics, the maximum of result with the minimum of expense.... The constitution of landed property in the Congo, regulated by the decree of 28th March, 1899, and the attribution of vacant lands by important lots to companies bound by a _cahier des charges_, form a work carefully thought out and elaborated on the advice of eminent jurists. It does honour to the Minister of the Colonies who took the initiative in the matter, my eminent colleague in the Chamber of Deputies, M. Guillain, as well as to the Councillor of State, M. Cotelle, who gave his active collaboration as President of the Commission of Concessions. [Sidenote: Concessions Justified.]