The story of the Congo Free State : $b Social, political, and economic aspects of the Belgian system of government in Central AfricaWack, Henry Wellington
History
The story of the Congo Free State : $b Social, political, and economic aspects of the Belgian system of government in Central Africa
Wack, Henry Wellington
Belgium -- Colonies -- Africa -- Administration; Congo (Democratic Republic) -- History -- To 1908
The next move in the campaign against the Congo Free State in this
country took place at Washington on the 30th of September, 1904,
when the Secretary of the Congo Reform Association (an English
organisation of which Mr. John Holt, the merchant-philanthropist, of
Liverpool, is one of the pillars) presented a memorial to President
Roosevelt concerning affairs in the Congo Free State, and asking
for his intervention therein. The memorial was politely received,
acknowledged with graceful platitudes, and laid aside. During the
few weeks that the Congo Reform Association’s agitator was in this
country, he talked freely to every newspaper reporter he met, and
disseminated broadcast the old libels which had grown stale with use
in England.
[Sidenote: The Belgian People Speak.]
When the Belgian people learned of the presentation to President
Roosevelt of the second anti-Congo memorial, wherein the agents of
the British merchants strove to make it appear that the United States
ought to do what all the continental powers had, by their silence,
refused to do when the British Foreign Secretary appealed to them
in August, 1903, their leading citizens took a hand in the literary
carnival and sent President Roosevelt their reply to the series of
slanders which were being so widely disseminated in America by the
Liverpool organisation. Although the anti-Congolese resolutions
of the Boston Peace Conference were published _in extenso_ in the
secular and religious press throughout the United States, for some
inscrutable reason the Belgian reply to the second Liverpool memorial
sent to President Roosevelt on October 3, 1904, has so far never had
the advantage of similar publicity. This fact alone would indicate
that his Excellency, Baron Moncheur, Belgian Minister to the United
States, and his talented coadjutor, Professor A. Nerincx, an eminent
Belgian advocate, author, and instructor in the University of
Louvain, were quite indifferent to that campaign of publicity which
the enemies of the Congo Free State began in England and now continue
in America. In justice, however, to the Federation for the Defence
of Belgian Interests Abroad, a Belgian society numbering over fifty
thousand adherents, it is deemed desirable to quote in full the only
communication bearing upon the anti-Congolese campaign which the
official of the Free State or the Belgian people have ever addressed
to the people of the United States:
FÉDÉRATION POUR LE DEFENSE DES INTERETS BELGES A L’ÉTRANGER.
BRUSSELS, October 3, 1904.
_To His Excellency, Theodore Roosevelt,
President of the United States._
MR. PRESIDENT:
The Federation for the Defence of Belgian Interests Abroad presents
its compliments to the President of the United States and begs
leave to state:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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