Has the State been right in considering itself the legitimate proprietor of vacant and unowned lands in the Congo? If any doubt existed on the subject, the luminous opinion given to our concessionaires by Maître Henri Barboux should suffice to remove it. After having recalled that in all countries, at all periods, the exercise of the right of sovereignty implied the appropriation for the profit of the State of conquered lands, the eminent advocate shows how England has made use of that prerogative; in Lower Canada where a single Governor granted 1,425,000 acres to sixty persons; in Upper Canada where in 1825 out of 17,000,000 measured acres, an extent almost equal to Ireland, 15,000,000 had been given in concession; in Australia where the distribution of lands to colonists in gratuitous concessions or by sale was never considered “as in contempt of the rights of the primitive inhabitants of the country, nor as contrary to the largest principles of commercial freedom.” In India, Ceylon, at Hong-Kong, in Africa (Cape Colony, Natal, Bechuanaland), in the Fiji Islands, Great Britain has always admitted that “the whole country falls to the Crown, and that the Crown can attribute to individuals portions of the country, while reserving as its own domain all which is not given in concession” (Creasy, _The Imperial and Colonial Constitutions of the Britannic Empire_, p. 66). Holland applies the same rules. In Germany the Imperial ordinance of 26th November, 1895, ordains in these terms: “Under reserve of the rights of property or other real rights that individuals or juridical persons, native chiefs or communities, can invoke, as well as of the rights of occupation of third persons resulting from contracts passed with the Imperial Government, _all the land of German East Africa is vacant land of the Crown. The proprietorship of it belongs to the Empire._”