Concerning the term “Freedom of Commerce,” which Congo enemies are interpreting to mean ungoverned license, we beg to refer the President to the laws of the United States and penalties concerning trespass upon and pillage of public lands and their product. Perhaps no nation in the world has so precisely developed the law of private and public property, nor administered it with finer understanding of the principles of equity and justice, than the United States. The Congo law relating to property is in consonance with the law of the world’s greatest nations. The great success which has been attained by the Congo Government for the betterment of its native inhabitants by the operation of this law, and the order which exists thereunder, has excited the envy and the avarice of those whose ulterior motive is being cloaked in the garb of humanitarianism and questionable philanthropy. On the one hand it is charged that the Congo Government by its method seeks to enslave the native in order that he may serve it with his hands for the benefit of interests whose welfare he does not share. On the other hand, the libellers of the Congo wilfully utter not only the unfounded accusation but the inconsistent charge, that the Government cuts off the hand whose work it seeks to enslave. Concerning the untruthful character of the testimony in this respect which has been published against the Congo by the promoters of the so-called “Congo Reform Association” of Liverpool, we beg to refer your Excellency to the great mass of genuine and reliable evidence by Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, Italians, and Belgians in direct contradiction of the falsehoods which form the traffic of the Association, whose leading spirit has never been near the Congo nor the natives who form the pretext of his search for personal notoriety and aggrandisement.