In spite of an element of Arab civilisation which the slave-trader had certainly implanted in the Congo Forest, he had made himself notorious for his ravages and cruelties. Numbers of natives had been horribly mutilated, hands and feet lopped off, and women’s breasts cut away. These people explained to me that these mutilations—which, as only a Negro could, they had survived—had been the work of the Manyema slave-trader and his gang, done sometimes out of wanton cruelty, sometimes as a punishment for thieving or absconding. May it not be that many of the mutilated people of whom we hear so much in the northern and eastern part of the Congo Free State are also the surviving results of Arab cruelty? I am aware that it is customary to attribute these outrages to the native soldiery and police employed by the Belgians to maintain order or to collect taxes; and though I am fully aware that these native soldiers and police under imperfect Belgian administration, _as under imperfect British control_, can commit all sorts of atrocities (as we know they did in Mashonaland and in Uganda), every bad deed of this description is not to be laid to their charge, for many outrages are the work of the Arab traders and raiders in these countries, and of their apt pupils the Manyemas. This much I can speak of with certainty and emphasis: that from the British frontier near Fort George to the limit of my journeys into the Mbuba country of the Congo Free State, up and down the Semliki, the natives appeared to be prosperous and happy under the excellent administration of the late Lieutenant Meura and his coadjutor, Mr. Karl Eriksson. The extent to which they were building their villages and cultivating their plantations within the precincts of Fort Mbeni showed that they had no fear of the Belgians, while the Dwarfs equally asserted the goodness of the local white men. Great value attaches to the evidence of Sir Harry Johnston, it being impossible to impute to him any particular bias. He travelled independently, visiting the Congo on three occasions—1882-83, 1891-96, and 1900. In a letter published in the _Daily Chronicle_ (London) of 28th September, 1903, he thus further expresses his opinion of the Congo Administration: