Reverting for a moment to the assertion that the Government of the Congo Free State is primarily responsible for what its detractors allege to be the enslavement of the native, I fail to find conviction in unfounded statements often repeated, and arguments upon wrong premises, varied only in form, not substance. Ignorance of the _motif_ impelling Congo State method and movement has misled those who have brought prejudice to a subject worth the attention only of the broadest minds. The _system_, which is the object of attack when new stories of atrocities are scarce, is briefly stated to be to devote the revenue derived from the State’s property as much as possible to cover the State’s expenses; that is to say, to the moral and material organisation and regeneration of the country and its inhabitants; to resort to the imposition of a tax in _specie_ as rarely as possible; and to exact a few hours’ labour monthly from the natives, in order to give them the habit of work, which is the greatest of civilising precepts. In this connection the Congo Government goes beyond its duty, and pays the natives for this work, teaching them the relation between labour and its reward. The habit of work, when formed, will elevate the natives from the savage instincts which tend to debase them in idleness. The exaction of, and payment for, forty-odd hours’ work each month from an able-bodied native, for whose redemption from savagery millions of money and many lives have been, and are being, spent, is a lesser tax than the white man pays on his meagre income from daily toil in the cities of London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. The county road tax alone, levied upon the farmer in the United States, is a greater imposition than this. Those who have the hardihood to argue that the enforced practice of habits of industry upon savages in an African colony, less than twenty years in the making, is an unjust and iniquitous burden, can have no conception of the condition of the white slaves of the Midland counties of England, no understanding of life and its burdens in the centres of the world’s highest civilisation. [Sidenote: The State Lands.]