The third and fourth articles contained the pledge of all the interested Powers to assist in enforcing these commendable provisions for the betterment of the black races in Africa. The succeeding apathy of the Powers in no wise abated the energy of the Congo Free State in its heroic effort to realise for civilisation the views which Belgian statesmen had largely inspired at the Conference. The Belgian campaigns against the Arabs, briefly narrated in succeeding chapters, were only one phase of those multiform difficulties which beset the pioneer in savage lands where the heralds of civilisation find it necessary to suppress the old and impose a new order of life upon untutored human beings. [Sidenote: Alcohol and Civilisation.] The second chapter referred, amongst other things, to caravan routes, the transport of slaves by land, and to providing means of livelihood and education for liberated slaves. The sixth chapter enumerated the measures to be taken to restrict the trade in spirituous liquors. The six articles composing this chapter forbid the importation of distilled drinks “in the regions where they have not yet penetrated,” and “each Power will determine for itself the limit of this zone within its own possessions.” It is in reference to these infirm clauses, as elastic as Congo rubber, that the Free State has fulfilled promise with performance that puts her neighbours to shame. Each year of Belgian rule in the Congo has been marked by a contraction of the area in which alcoholic liquors are legitimate traffic even in a restricted form. To-day spirituous liquors are practically excluded from more than four-fifths of the entire State. The Sovereign of the Congo Free State does not respect that colonising enthusiasm which is founded on deleterious Scotch whiskey, Holland gin, and Jamaica rum. He has, therefore, carried out the spirit as well as the letter of the liquor clauses in the Brussels Act, and lost revenue for the State from a source which, to a large degree, supports the budgets of neighbouring colonies. [Illustration: A Street in Coquilhatville, 1896 (Equateur).] In the eighth article it is declared that the experience of all nations who have intercourse with Africa has shown the pernicious and preponderating part played by firearms in slave trade operations as well as in intertribal wars, and has clearly proved that the preservation of the African populations is a radical impossibility unless restrictive measures against the trade in firearms and ammunition are established.