_YEWS OF THE WEEK.
AT the opening of the Belgian Session on Tuesday the new Prime Minister, M. Schollaert, made an important declaration in which he said that the Government were still determined to annex the Congo Free State to Belgium. "With- out in any way wishing to anticipate the result of the labours of the Commission," he said, according to the Times report, "we are in a position to state that careful study has confirmed, and perhaps gone beyond, the opinions previously formed on the state of material prosperity of our future colony and its future." It is obviously impossible for us to criticise a con- clusion when the materials on which it is founded are with- held, but hitherto all the estimates of the resources of the Congo which have reached us have been framed on the assumption that the cost of production would not be increased. That would mean that the present forced native labour would be retained, and to that retention we, as one of the Treaty Powers concerned, could not consent. On the other hand, we do not know whether Belgium would face the cost of running the Congo on normal economic lines. Two very interesting statements made by the Times correspondent are that the Government clearly recognise the impossibility of carrying the Treaty of Annexation:without the help of the Left, and that the Government will probably withdraw the present Treaty after it has been thoroughly criticised, and substitute something more acceptable.
