He puts the economical case in a nutshell thus:
“X——, District Commissioner, commits every day dozens of offences against individual liberty. What can be done? These violations of the law are necessitated by a great enterprise which must have workmen. In such cases the intervention of the magistrate would be a ruinous imprudence, calculated to bring trouble into the region.”
“But the law?”
“Oh, law in the Congo is not applicable!”
“But if you offered a decent remuneration, would you not get free labour?”
“That is precisely what the State will not listen to. It maintains that the enterprise must be carried out for nothing!”
And disposes once again of the “forty hours a month” fiction:
“It is impossible for the State to obtain the amount of rubber it sells annually, by labour limited to forty hours a month, especially when it is borne in mind that a number of these hours are absorbed in other corvées. Of two things one, therefore. Either the surplus is furnished freely; and if so, how can coercion be logically argued? Or this supplementary labour is forced; and if so, the law of forty hours is shown to be merely a fraud.”
He shows the root causes of the evil:
“So long as an inflexible will fixes in advance the quantity of rubber to be obtained; so long as instructions are given in this form: ‘Increase by five tons your rubber output per month’ (instance given by Father Cus and van Hencxthoven in their report), we cannot await with confidence a serious improvement, which is the desire of all....”