Centre, declared that Peters had been dismissed for the most unclean things an official could do.' Despite of this, Geheimrat von Hellwig, who conducted the prosecution, was forced to retire on a pension; and Dr Kayser, the Director of the Colonial Department, according to the statement of his widow, was threatened on his sick bed by the Conservative member Dr Arendt. General von Liebert, an ex-governor of German East Africa and President of the Anti-Socialist League, put the crown on official disregard of righteousness, by declaring that 'in Africa it was impossible to get on without cruelty,' and by calling Peters' condemnation a judicial murder.' Such were the forces at work to uphold the unworthy instruments of German colonial policy.

In regard to Herr Wehlan, an official of the Cameroons, it was said by a deputy, that he tumbled upstairs rather than down, being appointed, out of his turn, to a post as notary in Berlin, after having been found out. The charge against Wehlan was that of having grossly abused his authority, of treating the natives with the most revolting cruelty, and flogging and executing them on the most trivial pretexts. At the first trial he was fined 251. and was removed to another but no less important post. Once more public opinion found expression in the press and the Reichstag; and the case was referred to Leipzig, where the original verdict was confirmed.

At the end of December 1894, about a hundred native soldiers, mostly from Dahomey, who were employed in the Cameroons, made their way to Government House, where the officials were at dinner. They shot the Judge, who was seated at the head of the table, probably mistaking him for Deputy-Governor Leist, who had caused twenty of the men's wives to be publicly flogged for laziness. The mutineers then took possession of the town; the European merchants and traders sought refuge on the British and African Company's steamers; and the German officials fled to German gun-boats anchored in the river. Reinforcements quelled the mutiny; and two men and three women, who gave themselves up, were hanged. The soldiers' wives were flogged with a rhinoceros-hide whip, while the deputy-governor looked on; and soldiers were drawn up in parade order, to gaze on the revolting spectacle. Prince Arenberg had

the manliness to say in the Reichstag on Feb. 9, 1894, that Herr Leist had by this act polluted the name of Germany.' On Oct. 16, Leist was arraigned before the Disciplinary Court at Potsdam, charged not only with having had the women stripped and flogged, but (as described in the Reichstag) with having caused 'the women who had been pledged by the niggers for their debts to be brought to him from the Imperial "pawnshop" to brighten his hours of leisure'! Herr Rose, the prosecuting counsel, sent to the Cameroons on behalf of the Colonial Department to investigate the case, demanded Leist's dismissal from the Service. The Court found that he had not exceeded in the matter of the flogging, and that his conduct had not caused the mutiny, though the charges were not disputed. The Kreuz Zeitung' and other officially inspired organs of the press tried to make the best of a bad case; but the public took the matter up, and the Foreign Office appealed to the Supreme Court at Leipzig. Hereupon Leist was dismissed the Service and condemned in costs, the Higher Court taking the view that he had lowered German prestige.

The atrocities committed by Peters were exceeded by another German officer. On a punitive expedition against the Bahoho, who declined German protection, Lieut. Dominik attacked a village near the Nachtigal Falls on the River Sunague, and massacred the whole adult population. A number of little children, quoted in the Reichstag as fifty-two, were then placed in baskets, such as the black soldiers weave, and thrown into the rapids. Dominik, when charged with this, pleaded ignorance and the licentious cruelty of his six hundred native troops. Naturally the question suggests itself: Did these children drown without uttering a cry, or are German lieutenants both blind and deaf? Bebel and others could not accept Dominik's explanation, in view of the fact of the atrocious act having been witnessed by one Mr Genke (of Jaunde) and otherwise established. This same Dominik was accused by Bebel on Dec. 1, 1906, of having ordered his men to mutilate the bodies of dead enemies so as to show by their sanguinary trophies how many natives had fallen. That this is undeniable is proved by the British Government complaining of it in 1902 to the German Ambassador in

London, who reported the complaint to Berlin. Hereupon Lieut. Dominik was reprimanded; but the Governor of the Cameroons, von Puttkamer, though cognisant of the mutilation of corpses, was stated to have done nothing till then to check it. Germany honoured Peters and Dominik by erecting statues of them, the first at Dares-Salaam, the other at Jaunde.

The Dominik case recalls a still more disgusting and horrible mutilation, for it was perpetrated on living men. Lieut. Schennemann, the Station-Director at Jaunde in the Cameroons, had married a black wife, and, learning that she preferred the society of three natives, he sent a sergeant to find them, in order to put an effectual stop to their visits. By mistake the sergeant went to the wrong village, but, fearing the consequences if he returned with his orders unfulfilled, seized three strangers and, having mutilated them in the most horrible way, left these human wrecks uncared for by the wayside. The whole story was told openly in the Reichstag.

It is the fashion at the present moment, in certain quarters, to speak of the head of the Catholic party in the Reichstag, Herr Erzberger, as an impostor. That is not the light in which he showed himself regarding colonial scandals, for he always helped to bring them forward and animadverted on them unreservedly. To him and to another member named Ablass it was due that attention was called to the misdeeds of Capt. Thierry, whom they stated to have shot down the natives like game, and to be notorious for his cruelty. From first to last the attitude of the Government was to turn a deaf ear to abuses; and the principle adopted by Dernburg again and again was to make light of bad cases, while the Centre and the National Liberals encouraged the plain speaking of the Social-Democrats.

The publication of the crimes of Capt. Kannenberg was due to Deputies Erzberger, Bebel and Ledebour. Lying in his tent, in the autumn of 1898, at Kongwa in German East Africa, Kannenberg heard a noise and a child crying, which annoyed him. He got up, approached a neighbouring native hut, and putting his gun through the grass wall, fired it more than once. woman and her child were lying in bed and were injured by the shot. An official enquiry was ordered regarding

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his conduct, but no proceedings were taken. On another occasion, he sent for two village chiefs, termed Jumbis, to question them as to the meaning of certain words in their language. They refused to answer, restrained apparently by religious scruples. Furious at their resistance, he ordered them to be flogged, one man receiving seventy-five lashes, the other a hundred. Between each stroke, Kannenberg asked if the Jumbis would give the required reply. The men were then locked up for the night. Groaning in their misery, they were overheard by the sentinel on duty, who rushed in and clubbed one of the men with the butt-end of his gun. The man died that night. This time, Kannenberg was prosecuted, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment and dismissal from the Service, the Court considering that the sentry's blows and not the flogging might have caused the chief's death.

Ere long, Kannenberg's sentence was lightened; he was sent to a fortress to work out the remainder, pardoned shortly afterwards, and granted his full pension by the then Colonial Director, Stübel. An official of the Department, named Poeplau, doubtful whether the pension should have been paid in the circumstances, spoke respectfully of it to his immediate superior, with the consequence that he was subjected to disciplinary proceedings and was dismissed for his indiscretion. Kannenberg's was by no means the only case regarding which Poeplau had spoken his mind with the frankness of an honest man, and he had in consequence rendered himself obnoxious to the authorities. Dr Ablass, who was also Poeplau's legal representative, and able to prove his statements by documentary evidence, said in the Reichstag on Dec. 1, 1906, that, in consequence of Herr Poeplau's representations, the Chancellor had promised to open an enquiry, and that the enquiry was openedbut against Herr Poeplau. Dr Ablass added:

'It was clear to me that the whole matter was to be enquired into privately, and that it was intended to hush up the horrible conditions of which Herr Bebel spoke with indignation. In this suppression all the officials of the Colonial Department were united ("Very true," from the Left and Centre), and the Chancellor set his seal upon it. . . . I beg

you to understand that what Herr Poeplau has reported has proved correct in all essential points.'

Poeplau was one of many scapegoats, yet even the Conservative Dr Arendt, the excuser of Peters, felt compelled to say, on March 15, 1906: At the outset the colonies served as a dumping ground for damaged reputations, and unsuitable elements were often sent out.'

Of no one was this more true than of Governor von Puttkamer, the nephew of Bismarck and son of a Minister of State, a roué and a gambler. Von Puttkamer made himself no enviable reputation in the Cameroons, and this not least by his conduct regarding the so-called Frau von Eckhardstein, otherwise Frau von Germar, née Ecke, to whom he not only supplied a false passport when she returned to Germany, after knowing her for many years and allowing her to reside openly at Government House, but whom he sent in to dinner with the Commander of the Habicht,' when the latter was there as the naval representative of the Kaiser. The lady seems to have come out of the affair better than von Puttkamer. She at least told her story straightforwardly in a paper entitled 'Neue Gesellschaftliche Korrespondenz,' and proved that, though examined on oath for several hours, she was not allowed to bear witness in court, where her statements were wholly misrepresented.

All this, however, is a small matter in comparison with the wider issues which led to the exposure of von Puttkamer by the Social-Democrats. Their charges covered the ground of his having shut his eyes to atrocities committed by his subordinates, several of which have been already mentioned; that he took no steps to check the incredible immorality of the officials and spent public money on building himself a luxurious residence for ministering to his own pleasures; also that he did not keep his hands clean in regard to the promotion of colonial companies. The Government was forced to take action, and a modified presentation of the charges at Puttkamer's trial before the Disciplinary Court on April 25, 1909, resulted in the inadequate punishment of a fine of 1000 marks. Not least amongst von Puttkamer's sins of omission was his utter neglect