It is not infrequent that the cable conveys to us intimation that in some sections of your own free and glorious country an inflamed mob seizes upon a black inhabitant and burns him at the stake. Our governmental experience has taught us that such acts would have been impossible if your Government had been advised in time to prevent them. And yet we know that your Government is the subject of harsh criticism by self-constituted associations formed in the same country whence come those who accuse the sincere governmental effort of the Congo Free State. The law of the Congo Free State is based upon the loftiest ideals of humane control of a vast territory and undeveloped interests, and every part of the State’s machinery is employed to ensure equal justice to all. The “method of the State,” at which Congo accusers hurl their shafts, cannot be charged with responsibility for lawless acts in a vast territory of a million square miles where the Government of that State is vigilantly and earnestly seeking, by the extension of its organisation and police powers, to suppress and punish crime and redress wrong. If the subjects of one nation were compelled to submit to the opinion of its unfriendly neighbours as to the correctness of their habits and conduct, and obliged to submit themselves to the penalties that their neighbours would attach to the alleged misconduct, the subjects of one nation would inhabit the prisons of another. We need hardly call the attention of your Government to the great and humane work which your Government is now so earnestly, and with so much sacrifice, furthering in the Philippine Islands, to meet with that broad and sympathetic view of the situation in all savage countries; which, if fairly and justly applied to the Congo Free State, would place us upon that plane where co-operation, not criticism, were the reward of our sacrificial work in the darkest part of Africa. It has been the pleasure of our beloved King, Leopold II., Sovereign of the Congo Free State, to appoint a Commission, composed of eminent men, to undertake with the utmost freedom a judicial investigation upon all and singular the vague charges from time to time used by the promoters of the Congo Reform Association in prostituting certain public journals in England. Your Excellency may be assured of the utmost integrity of the gentlemen who compose this Commission, and that the Congo Government will afford them all the help in its power to place the truth before the eyes of the world. In this connection Congo reformers pretend that the decisions of the Congo Courts indicate that the government is bad, when in fact these very decisions are, in our opinion, proof of unimpeachable good faith and judicial independence.