Obviously the “freedom of commerce” intended by the General Act of the Berlin Conference is not the open door with the key thrown away and chaos prevailing behind it. The State is mistress of her domain. She is alone responsible for its civil order and the just regulation of its life, whether social, commercial, or political. Her attitude upon all fundamental rules of civilised government has two facets: the one toward her subjects, the other toward the society of nations which surrounds her. She must conduct her affairs with due regard for those broad principles of national morality which civilised communities recognise as a lofty standard of social and political life. Until she prove herself incompetent in this respect, her territory cannot become the subject of international partition or regulation on pretexts of humanitarianism or on any other, nor is it in the justice of nations or of men to undermine the force of her authority or to enfeeble the integrity of her Statehood by any agency whatsoever. [Sidenote: Conditions in 1895.] From the latest report of the Vice-Governor-General of the Congo Free State are quoted below statements which shed light upon the belief held by the Belgians concerning their own fiscal policy, and the attitude they offer to the criticisms of its burly neighbour, Great Britain, in its rule of the Soudan and its other colonial possessions: In the region of commerce the Congo State, which was the first to inscribe in its international conventions the principles of liberty, has not failed, no matter what any one says to the contrary, in the programme which was drawn up in 1884, and of which, as has recently been recalled, Stanley was made the spokesman. The _régime_ of the “open door,” which has just been claimed by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, at the very moment, too, when purely philanthropic declarations were being heard in the House of Commons, is that also of the Congo State; and there cannot be discovered in our territory the existence of monopolies such as those of ivory and rubber which the Government of the Soudan has created for its own profit in some parts of the Soudan.[11]