A Few Days Before Korzeniowski returned to Brussels from Poland in May 1890, Henry Morton Stanley, the famed nineteenth-century traveler, delivered a speech in the building of the Brussels Exchange. He had just arrived in great triumph after a successful expedition for the relief of Emin Pasha, who had been cut off by the Mahdist revolt. “What does the greatness of a monarch consist in?” he asked. “If it is the extent of his territory, then the Emperor of Russia is the greatest of all. If it is the splendour and power of military organization then William II takes first place. But if royal greatness consists in the wisdom and goodness of a sovereign leading his people with the solicitude of a shepherd watching over his flock, then the greatest sovereign is your own.”

The Congo Free State, extending over a huge area of nearly 900,000 square miles, was under the direct rule of Leopold II, the King of Belgium. It officially became a European dependency in 1885, relatively late, following the decision of the Berlin Congress, at which Leopold, the shrewd monarch of a small country, managed to play skillfully against each other the rivalry and jealousy of powerful states. He also knew how to make clever use of slogans about progress, the civilizing mission, and the enlightenment and ennoblement of “savages”: “To bring civilization to the only part of this globe where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which envelops entire populations—is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this age of progress.” Stanley, in King Leopold II’s service from 1879 to 1884 as an explorer and administrator on behalf of the Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation en Afrique, last lent his personal authority and propagandistic gift by publishing, among other works, a laudatory two-volume report, The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State: A Story of Work and Exploration.