The interest taken by Americans in the affairs of the Congo Free State has never been very keen. What little of interest, however, we do take in that distant region has been sentimental, for the greater part based upon the national respect for Stanley and his work. The campaign in England against the Congo, therefore, fails to evoke any substantial sympathy on this side of the Atlantic. Citizens of the United States are better employed than in undertaking knight-errantry at the behest of certain disappointed British merchants and fanatics. [Sidenote: American Aid Wanted.] But, inasmuch as it is vital to the enemies of the Congo Free State that our country should be with them in their crusade, the Rev. Mr. W. M. Morrison, of Lexington, Virginia, a gentleman whose Christianity is liberally leavened with business acumen, was brought to the front and set upon a pedestal. The light of publicity was turned upon the reverend gentleman, who then proceeded to relate stories of outrage and oppression, examples of which he had seen and heard—_chiefly heard_—during six years’ residence in the Congo Free State as a missionary of the American Presbyterians. Mr. Morrison’s stories are of the stock variety, and include looted villages, wholesale deportations, mutilations, burnings, State slavery, and _refusal of land concessions to missionaries_—in brief, the whole catalogue of infamies without which, real or alleged, men such as Mr. Fox Bourne, the Secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Society in England, and Mr. Morel, who built the Congo Reform Association around himself, would find their occupation gone. The italics are mine. Why I have used them will at once appear. [Sidenote: A Morrisonian Jeremiad.] “Concessions or grants of land, however small,” wails Mr. Morrison, “can now no longer be obtained from the State by other than favoured individuals or corporations... Not only are concessions refused to traders, they are also refused to missionaries.” Alas! yes, in the case of a missionary who demands, as Mr. Morrison did, “that no taxes shall be levied, and no soldiers drawn from certain populations around Luebo.”[46] The refusal of Mr. Morrison’s demand for the creation of an Alsatia which should be equally attractive to the idle and the thrifty, from which the State was to receive no support, and which, in the circumstances, would certainly at once become the most populous district in all the Congo Free State, seems to have angered the reverend gentleman, for thereafter followed his discovery of atrocities committed by State officials against natives. Land was offered to Mr. Morrison upon equitable terms, identical with those agreed upon between the State and numerous other missions. [Sidenote: A Belated Discovery.]