ROYAL INSOLENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume XL, Issue 271, 13 November 1909, Page 18

ROYAL INSOLENCE.

KING LEOPOLD TBHATS BRITAIN WITH CONTEMPT. The Congo Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall was on September 23 opened bj Mr. B. D. Morel, of the Congo Reform Association. The llev. 3. IX. Shakespeare, secretary of the Baptist Union, who presided, eaid when the door of tiie Congo was opened there had been let In a hellish crowd—the raider, the land-grabber, the murderer, and the taskmaster. They bad thought that it was to be the beginning of a golden day for the Congo, and they bad dreamed of dusky natives, happy and Industrious, with native churches and Sunday-schools, but Instead they had found people with hands cut off, disembowelled natives, children tossed upon spears, human heads floating down the Congo, znd the natives ground down, leaving them with no rights and no possessions. They were bearing of 'the whistling lash, the torturing chains, and th« rattling of guns, and, he asked, was thert ever such an awful dispelling of human dreams as this? He did not believe that Belgium was going to be arbitrated or talked out of the Congo, and any bold words spokea in Parliament by any Cabinet Minister which were not followed by bold and resolute action would only deserve and receive bitter treatment all round. No reform could be made until the present system was swept away. Mr. Morel said few records were more amazing than the record pursued over six years of the failure of the Foreign Office to deal adequately with King Leopold and his Mlnlstere. If It were possible to bring home to the people of Great Britain the full story of the persistent insolence with which the King of the Belgians had treated British, representations, and the mingled contempt, bad faith, and truculence displayed by his Ministers during the past eighteen months, a wave of passionate anger would sweep through the country. Over a year had passed since the Belgian annexation, and the crack ot the slave driver's whip was still heard throughout the land, those that authorised It apparently, supposing that the sound was sufficient to bring not onty the Congo native but the British Government to heel. Sir Edward Grey had pledged himself, and had pledged the country in this mutter. ,To say that the Belgian Government upon annexing could net change, and change completely, the vile system of slavery obtaining, was a proposition unsustainable In argu;nent. If the British Government imagined that feeling in this country was on the wane, they were mistaken. The next three months would afford striking proof to the contrary.