small. Briefly, Germany's object in colonisation was to do good business. Had this been carried out justly and equitably, no one could have complained; but Schrecklichkeit was used persistently as the weapon to subjugate the natives, and the men sent to wield it were mostly failures, or worse- abgelebt' (men who have lived), as one of their countrymen has called them. It seems scarcely necessary to dwell on the infamy of sending such men as representatives of European civilisation and the Christian standard to peoples in the childhood of knowledge.

The Social Democrats were always outspoken in the Reichstag, but criticisms of the policy pursued were by no means limited to them. Prince Hohenlohe, speaking for the Colonial Department on March 13, 1906, said:

'Faults have been committed. The Governor of East Africa has directly acknowledged it. He has confessed that such faults have happened in East Africa under his administration. . . . He has expressed his doubts whether the hut tax as it stands, as also the so-called forced labour, are legitimate measures.'

On November 28, 1906, Dr Schaedler called the story of the colonies one of

' embezzlements, falsifyings, sensual cruelties, assaults on women, horrible ill-treatment-things that do not serve to make a laurel wreath'; and he added that 'officials and officers who stink materially and morally are no good to us in the Colonies, not even if they were royal princes, but could only be suited to drag the German, and I would add the Christian, name in the dust.'

Many similar opinions could be cited. It was also proved that in East Africa and the Cameroons German officials taught the natives an immorality hitherto unknown to them, disregarded their feelings by taking their wives and fiancées to satisfy their own passions, and built houses at the expense of the State for the accommodation of their copious female retinue.

The cases of the notorious Dr Karl Peters, of Wehlan, and of Leist were commented on in their day by the press, and are therefore given here only in general outline. They are representative of the brutality, debauchery,

and sensuality which stain German colonial administration. Peters was lauded to the skies by his admirers as a progressive pioneer of colonial expansion; his own writings reveal him as unscrupulous, a plunderer and utterly inhuman-a self-revelation fully borne out by other testimony. The explorer Scavenius, after following in his steps near the Tana river, says:

'On every side I came on traces of war. In the neighbourhood of Obangi I found eleven villages that had been destroyed by fire, and everywhere skeletons of men, women and children,* those of women and children being especially numerous.'

The perpetrator was Peters,† while ostensibly conducting an expedition for the relief of Emin Pasha, but really intent on furthering German interests in Uganda and also on acquiring vast territories for himself as 'Supreme Lord.' For his services he was sent in 1891 as Imperial Commissioner to East Africa, where his crimes were so heinous that the most daring official whitewashing could not hide their blackness. The climax was reached when Peters hanged his young servant Mabruk, ostensibly for stealing cigarettes, really because he had visited a native girl with whom Peters was himself on terms of intimacy. The girl was repeatedly flogged and finally hanged.

Peters was tried before a disciplinary court and dismissed the service, not for his atrocities, but for having lied to his superiors. He appealed to the Supreme Court at Leipzig, which confirmed the dismissal, condemning him to payment of all costs. Part of the trial was heard in camera, because of the nature of the self-revelations he had made to the Austrian Consul-General at Zanzibar, who offered his evidence. And yet Peters' partisans were not satisfied, but appealed to the Kaiser, with the result that he was partially rehabilitated and received back his title of Imperial Commissioner. It is only fair to say that honest men in Germany, of both the Centre and the Socialist parties, spoke out boldly and repeatedly on the Peters' case. Deputy Dr Lieber, the leader of the

* Peters owned to shooting every native he came across and pouring petroleum on every hut and setting fire to it.

For other details see Lewin's Germans and Africa,' and Peters' own work: New Light on Dark Africa.'

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. A woman and her child were lying in bed and were injured by the shot. An official enquiry was ordered regarding