Go up the Kasai River to Djoko Punda and you believe, despite the background of tropical vegetation and the ever-present naked savage, that for the moment you are back in the United States. You see American jitneys scooting through the jungle; you watch five-ton American tractors hauling heavy loads along the sandy roads; you hear American slang and banter on all sides, and if you are lucky enough to be invited to a meal you get American hot cakes with real American maple syrup. The air tingles with Yankee energy and vitality.

All this means that you have arrived at the outpost of Little America in the Belgian Congo—the first actual signboard of the least known and most picturesque piece of American financial venturing abroad. It has helped to redeem a vast region from barbarism and opened up an area of far-reaching economic significance. At Djoko Punda you enter the domain of the Forminiere, the corporation founded by a monarch and which has a kingdom for a partner. Woven into its story is the romance of a one-time barefoot Virginia boy who became the commercial associate of a king.

What is the Forminiere and what does it do? The name is a contraction of SociÉtÉ Internationale Forestiere & Miniere du Congo. In the Congo, where companies have long titles, it is the fashion to reduce them to the dimensions of a cable code-word. Thus the high-sounding Compagnie Industrielle pour les Transports et Commerce au Stanley Pool is mercifully shaved to "Citas." This information, let me say, is a life-saver for the alien with a limited knowledge of French and whose pronunciation is worse.

Clearly to understand the scope and purpose of the Forminiere you must know that it is one of the three companies that have helped to shape the destiny of the Congo. I encountered the first—the Union Miniere—the moment I entered the Katanga. The second is the Huileries du Congo Belge, the palm-oil producers whose bailiwick abuts upon the Congo and Kwilu Rivers. Now we come to the third and the most important agency, so far as American interest is affected, in the Forminiere, whose empire is the immense section watered by the Kasai River and which extends across the border into Angola. In the Union Miniere you got the initial hint of America's part in the development of the Congo. That part, however, was entirely technical. With the Forminiere you have the combination of American capital and American engineering in an achievement that is, to say the least, unusual.

The moment I dipped into Congo business history I touched the Forminiere for the reason that it was the pet project of King Leopold, and the last and favorite corporate child of his economic statesmanship. Moreover, among the leading Belgian capitalists interested were men who had been Stanley's comrades and who had helped to blaze the path of civilization through the wilds. King Albert spoke of it to me in terms of appreciation and more especially of the American end. I felt a sense of pride in the financial courage and physical hardihood of my countrymen who had gone so far afield. I determined to see the undertaking at first hand.

My experience with it proved to be the most exciting of my whole African adventure. All that I had hitherto undergone was like a springtime frolic compared to the journey up the Kasai and through the jungle that lurks beyond. I saw the war-like savage on his native heath; I travelled with my own caravan through the forest primeval; I employed every conceivable kind of transport from the hammock swung on a pole and carried on the shoulders of husky natives, to the automobile. The primitive and modern met at almost every stage of the trip which proved to be first cousin to a thriller from beginning to end. Heretofore I had been under the spell of the Congo River. Now I was to catch the magic of its largest tributary, the Kasai.

Long before the Forminiere broke out its banner, America had been associated with the Congo. It is not generally known that Henry M. Stanley, who was born John Rowlands, achieved all the feats which made him an international figure under the name of his American benefactor who adopted him in New Orleans after he had run away to sea from a Welsh workhouse. He was for years to all intents and purposes an American, and carried the American flag on two of his famous expeditions.

President Cleveland was the first chief dignitary of a nation to recognize the Congo Free State in the eighties, and his name is perpetuated in Mount Cleveland, near the headwaters of the Congo River. An American Minister to Belgium, General H. S. Sanford, had a conspicuous part in all the first International African Associations formed by King Leopold to study the Congo situation. This contact, however, save Stanley's share, was diplomatic and a passing phase. It was the prelude to the constructive and permanent part played by the American capitalists in the Forminiere, chief of whom is Thomas F. Ryan.

The reading world associates Ryan with the whirlpool of Big Finance. He ruled New York traction and he recast the tobacco world. Yet nothing appealed to his imagination and enthusiasm like the Congo. He saw it in very much the same way that Rhodes viewed Rhodesia. Every great American master of capital has had his particular pet. There is always some darling of the financial gods. The late J. P. Morgan, for example, regarded the United States Steel Corporation as his prize performance and talked about it just like a doting father speaks of a successful son. The Union Pacific System was the apple of E. H. Harriman's eye, and the New York Central was a Vanderbilt fetish for decades. So with Ryan and the Congo. Other powerful Americans have become associated with him, as you will see later on, but it was the tall, alert, clear-eyed Virginian, who rose from penniless clerk to be a Wall Street king, who first had the vision on this side of the Atlantic, and backed it with his millions. I am certain that if Ryan had gone into the Congo earlier and had not been engrossed in his American interests, he would probably have done for the whole of Central Africa what Rhodes did for South Africa.

We can now get at the beginnings of the Forminiere. Most large corporations radiate from a lawyer's office. With the Forminiere it was otherwise. The center of inspiration was the stone palace at Brussels where King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, held forth. The year 1906 was not a particularly happy one for him. The atrocity campaign was at its height abroad and the Socialists were pounding him at home. Despite the storm of controversy that raged about him one clear idea shone amid the encircling gloom. That idea was to bulwark the Congo Free State, of which he was also sovereign, before it was ceded to Belgium.

Between 1879 and 1890 Leopold personally supported the cost of creating and maintaining the Free State. It represented an outlay of more than $2,500,000. Afterwards he had adequate return in the revenues from rubber and ivory. But Leopold was a royal spender in the fullest sense. He had a variety of fads that ranged from youthful and beguiling femininity to the building of palaces and the beautifying of his own country. He lavished millions on making Brussels a sumptuous capital and Ostend an elaborate seaside resort. With his private life we are not concerned. Leopold the pleasure-seeker was one person; Leopold the business man was another, and as such he was unique among the rulers of Europe.

Leopold contradicted every known tradition of royalty. The king business is usually the business of spending unearned money. Your royal spendthrift is a much more familiar figure than the royal miser. Moreover, nobody ever associates productive power with a king save in the big family line. His task is inherited and with it a bank account sufficient to meet all needs. This immunity from economic necessity is a large price to pay for lack of liberty in speech and action. The principal job of most kings, as we all know, is to be a noble and acquiescent figure-head, to pin decorations on worthy persons, and to open public exhibitions.

Leopold did all of these things but they were incidental to his larger task. He was an insurgent from childhood. He violated all the rules of the royal game not only by having a vision and a mind all his own but in possessing a keen commercial instinct. Geography was his hobby at school. Like Rhodes, he was forever looking at maps. When he became king he saw that the hope of Belgium economically lay in colonization. In 1860 he made a journey to the Far East, whence he returned deeply impressed with trade opportunities in China. Afterwards he was the prime mover in the construction of the Pekin-Hankow Railway. I do not think most persons know that Leopold at one time tried to establish a Belgian colony in Ethiopia. Another act in his life that has escaped the casual biographer was his effort to purchase the Philippines from Spain. Now you can see why he seized upon the Congo as a colonizing possibility the moment he read Henry M. Stanley's first article about it in the London Telegraph.

There was a vital reason why Belgium should have a big and prosperous colony. Her extraordinary internal development demanded an outlet abroad. The doughty little country so aptly called "The Cockpit of Europe," and which bore the brunt of the first German advance in the Great War, is the most densely populated in the world. It has two hundred and forty-seven inhabitants for each square kilometer. England only counts one hundred and forty-six, Germany one hundred and twenty-five, France seventy-two, and the United States thirteen. The Belgians had to have economic elbow room and Leopold was determined that they should have it.

His creation of the Congo Free State was just one evidence of his shrewdness and diplomacy. Half a dozen of the great powers had their eye on this untouched garden spot in Central Africa and would have risked millions of dollars and thousands of men to grab it. Leopold, through a series of International Associations, engineered the famous Berlin Congress of 1884 and with Bismarck's help put the Free State on the map, with himself as steward. It was only a year ago in Germany that a former high-placed German statesman admitted to me that one of the few fundamental mistakes that the Iron Chancellor ever made was to permit Leopold to snatch the Congo from under the very eyes and hands of Germany. I quote this episode to show that when it came to business Leopold made every king in Europe look like an office boy. Even so masterful a manipulator of men as Cecil Rhodes failed with him. Rhodes sought his aid in his trans-African telegraph scheme but Leopold was too shrewd for him. After his first audience with the Belgian king Rhodes said to Robert Williams, "I thought I was clever but I was no match for him."

The only other modern king interested in business was the former Kaiser, Mr. Wilhelm Hohenzollern. Although he has no business sense in the way that Leopold had it, he always had a keen appreciation of big business as an imperial prop. Like Leopold, he had a congested country and realized that permanent expansion lay in colonization. The commercial magnates of Germany used him for their own ends but their teamwork advanced the whole empire. Wilhelm was a silent partner in the potash, shipping, and electric-machinery trusts. He earned whatever he received because he was in every sense an exalted press-agent,—a sort of glorified publicity promoter. His strong point was to go about proclaiming the merits of German wares and he always made it a point to scatter samples. On a visit to Italy he left behind a considerable quantity of soap. There was a great rush to get these royal left-overs. Two weeks later a small army of German soap salesmen descended upon the country selling this identical product.

Whatever may be said of Leopold, one thing is certain. He was not small. Wilhelm used the brains of other men; Leopold employed his own, and every capitalist who went up against him paid tribute to this asset.

We can now go back to 1906, the year that was to mark the advent of America into the Congo. Leopold knew that the days of the Congo as a Free State were numbered. His personally-conducted stewardship of the Colony was being assailed by the Socialists on one hand and the atrocity proclaimers on the other. Leopold was undoubtedly sincere in his desire to economically safeguard the African possession before it passed out of his control. In any event, during the summer of that year he sent a message to Ryan asking him to confer with him at Brussels. The summons came out of a clear sky and at first the American financier paid no attention to it. He was then on a holiday in Switzerland. When a second invitation came from the king, he accepted, and in September there began a series of meetings between the two men which resulted in the organization of the Forminiere and with it the dawn of a real international epoch in American enterprise.

In the light of our immense riches the timidity of American capital in actual constructive enterprise overseas is astonishing. Scrutinize the world business map and you see how shy it has been. We own rubber plantations in Sumatra, copper mines in Chile, gold interests in Ecuador, and have dabbled in Russian and Siberian mining. These undertakings are slight, however, compared with the scope of the world field and our own wealth. Mexico, where we have extensive smelting, oil, rubber, mining and agricultural investments, is so close at hand that it scarcely seems like a foreign country. Strangely enough our capital there has suffered more than in any other part of the globe. The spectacle of American pioneering in the Congo therefore takes on a peculiar significance.

There are two reasons why our capital has not wandered far afield. One is that we have a great country with enormous resources and consequently almost unlimited opportunities for the employment of cash at home. The other lies in the fact that American capital abroad is not afforded the same protection granted the money of other countries. Take British capital. It is probably the most courageous of all. The sun never sets on it. England is a small country and her money, to spread its wings, must go elsewhere. Moreover, Britain zealously safeguards her Nationals and their investments, and we, I regret to say, have not always done likewise. The moment an Englishman or the English flag is insulted a warship speeds to the spot and John Bull wants to know the reason why.

Why did Leopold seek American capital and why did he pick out Thomas F. Ryan? There are several motives and I will deal with them in order. In the first place American capital is about the only non-political money in the world. The English pound, for example, always flies the Union Jack and is a highly sensitive commodity. When England puts money into an enterprise she immediately makes the Foreign Office an accessory. German overseas enterprise is even more meddlesome. It has always been the first aid to poisonous and pernicious penetration. Even French capital is flavoured with imperialism despite the fact that it is the product of a democracy. Our dollars are not hitched to the star of empire. We have no dreams of world conquest. It is the safest politically to deal with, and Leopold recognized this fact.

In the second place he did not want anything to interfere with his Congo rubber industry. Now we get to the real reason, perhaps, why he sent for Ryan. In conjunction with the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Ryan had developed the rubber industry in Mexico, by extracting rubber from the guayele shrub which grows wild in the desert. Leopold knew this—he had a way of finding out about things—and he sought to kill two birds with one stone. He wanted this Mexican process and at the same time he needed capital for the Congo. In any event, Ryan went to see him and the Forminiere was born.

There is no need of rehearsing here the concrete details of this enterprise. All we want are the essential facts. Leopold realized that the Forminiere was the last business venture of his life and he projected it on a truly kingly scale. It was the final chance for huge grants and the result was that the Forminiere received the mining and mineral rights to more than 7,000,000 acres, and other concessions for agriculture aggregating 2,500,000 acres in addition.

The original capital was only 3,000,000 francs but this has been increased from time to time until it is now more than 10,000,000 francs. The striking feature of the organization was the provision inserted by Leopold that made Belgium a partner. One-half of the shares were assigned to the Crown. The other half was divided into two parts. One of these parts was subscribed by the King and the SociÉtÉ Generale of Belgium, and the other was taken in its entirety by Ryan. Subsequently Ryan took in as associates Daniel Guggenheim, Senator Aldrich, Harry Payne Whitney and John Hays Hammond. When Leopold died his share went to his heirs. Upon the death of Aldrich his interest was acquired by Ryan, who is the principal American owner. No shares have ever been sold and none will be. The original trust certificate issued to Ryan and Guggenheim remains intact. The company therefore remains a close corporation in every respect and as such is unique among kindred enterprises.