Thus much from the report of King Leopold’s Commission. What is called the “sentry system” is the most atrocious factor in this policy. As a matter of course coercion must be used in the enforcement of a continuous labour-tax. An army of thirty thousand native soldiers is maintained for the suppression and exploitation of the people, who are unarmed and defenseless. Thus can a king do when he becomes a trader. This army is raised by conscription, and is practically an army of slaves. The conscripts are removed from their own people and are made to serve among strangers. Despair is never a sanctifying grace; and these desperate men are armed and compelled to a life of continual cruelty and shocking crime, whereby they are in course of time transformed into foulest fiends. To them is committed the oversight of those who collect rubber and the punishment of those who come short. This is the “sentry system.” When I visited Boma and Matadi the commonest subject of conversation, both by traders and missionaries, was the Belgian atrocities. Matadi is one hundred and ten miles from the sea. Between Boma and Matadi, at a bend in the river, there is a fearful whirlpool called the Devil’s Caldron, at least it is “fearful” in the wet season when the river is highest and the current swiftest. This vortex is the shape of a funnel. As we left it on our right and passed across the outer rim, the big ocean steamer listed to starboard. A short time before, a lighter loaded with cargo and manned by Kruboys had been drawn into it. Several persons watched it as it swept around in a narrowing circle until at last near the centre it suddenly took a header and plunged into the abyss with its human freight. Matadi is built on the side of a perpendicular rock, which Richard Harding Davis says is “not so large as Gibraltar, nor so high as the Flatiron Building, but it is a little more steep than either. Three narrow streets lead to its top. They are of flat stones, with cement gutters. The stones radiate the heat of stove-lids. They are worn to a mirror-like smoothness, and from their surface the sun strikes between your eyes, at the pit of your stomach, and blisters the soles of your mosquito boots.”