His solicitude for the Belgians, their economic needs, their legitimate and necessary expansion, gave point to his consideration of a distant land, where great natural wealth lay unrevealed and unused, for the good of the native and his benefactor. A wild life abounded in those parts which by civilisation might be regenerated and brought into the sphere of human usefulness. Here opportunity seemed to throw wide her arms for the Prince with the courage to dare an undertaking which the great Powers and the small had so far deftly avoided. “I will pierce barbaric darkness; I will secure to Central Africa the blessing of civilised government. And I will, if necessary, undertake this great task alone.” So spake his Majesty, when, as Duke of Brabant, he electrified Europe with what Europe, in her narrowed conservatism, regarded as the utopian utterances of an impractical and effervescing youth. Europe smiled and shrugged her shoulders at the temerity of him who essayed to analyse the heart of Africa and prescribe its panacea. If this great task had fallen upon a man of ordinary natural powers and acquired means, that part of Darkest Africa which now defies the organised conspiracy of the despoiler would interest nobody save the slave-trader who terrorised the land and polluted the sea with the black man’s blood. To his Majesty’s great initiative in 1876, and to his prescience of mind, his generous hand, and astonishing industry in the cause which inspired him are due those two decades of progress which some regard as a triumph of Colonial civilisation; while others, from motives which need not be examined with a lens, stigmatise it as the curse of Central Africa. Point of view and interest are important elements in all controversy. Where so much has been charged and refuted, a judicial attitude is sometimes maintained with difficulty. But against the assertion that the Congo Free State is a creation of the General Act of the Berlin Conference, may be arrayed a body of well-settled law which only an unreasoning enemy or a paid advocate would have the hardihood to dispute. [Sidenote: Simple Facts Briefly Told.] Long before the Berlin Conference had been conceived, acts of government had been effecting organisation and order in the territory now known as the “Independent State of the Congo.” Legislation, one of the later signs of established government, had occurred in the territory acquired by the _Comité d’Études du Haut-Congo_, of which King Leopold was honorary president and Colonel Strauch president. [Illustration: Taking Merchandise to the ss. “Leopoldville.”]