Gentlemen, I must limit very closely the observations which I was going to make to you. My learned friend and I had somewhat laboriously prepared ourselves for dealing with all the possible issues of fact that might be raised in this case that were suggested by the accusations against Captain De Keyser. That has passed out of the case, and I must treat very shortly the questions with which I should otherwise have had at some length to deal. It is essential when you are considering the persons against whom, if I prove the publication, your verdict must go, for you to consider who those persons are. The accusations which were made have been made by Captain Burrows and published by the Everetts, and were accusations which concerned the course of government in the Congo Free State, a matter which has attracted great attention from time to time and with regard to which certain very strong statements have been made in this country and elsewhere. [Illustration: Native Christians of the Village of Our Lady of Lourdes, near the Mission of Luluabourg, 1897.] Now, Gentlemen, the Congo Free State is a State which, as a separate and independent State, has not existed very long. It was in the year 1884 or 1885 that that State was constituted under the Government of the King of the Belgians, who is called the King Sovereign of the State, and it has from that time been administered by Belgian authorities as the authority of the Free State. It has been a Government in process of construction, and it was not, perhaps, until the year 1891 that it can be said that there was an organised system of government extending over the Congo Free State. It is an enormous area of over 800,000 square miles. It is an area scantily populated, but populated by savages of almost the lowest type of existence, savages among whom the practice of cannibalism, the practice of mutilation of enemies who have been killed in battle, and of violent punishments as between one tribe and another, had reigned without check until the representatives of civilisation came, in the officers of the Congo Free State, and established some sort of organisation and government throughout that country. The difficulties have been enormous. The difficulty of dealing with an area of more than 800,000 square miles with only a very few hundred white men who were in command of black troops, drawn from the very tribes whose habits I just now referred to, has been enormous. It has been one of the most anxious and difficult tasks that a civilised country ever undertook. That task has been fulfilled—on the whole with signal success. No set of men are absolutely free from reproach. The position of the representatives of the Congo Free State has been an extremely difficult one. At the time when Captain De Keyser went out, a captain and seventy-five men had been killed a few weeks before,