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Their Majesties' present Afric tour was preluded when they left Antwerp some weeks ago on the steamer Thysville, but began in earnest as they landed at Boma, in the mouth of Mother Congo. The big black toe of Congoland was their objective—namely the city of Elizabethville, which lies 900 miles inland, at the very toe and tip of the Belgian Congo, just where it touches Great Britain's colony of Northern Rhodesia (so named after its exploiter, Cecil John Rhodes). Between Elizabethville and Port Franc-qui (named after the rehabilitator of Belgium's currency, former Finance Minister Emile Francqui) lie the Katanga Mountains, rich in copper, and over them runs a 660 mile long railway which King & Queen proceeded to inaugurate. Local copper executives dolefully informed His Majesty that their Blackamoor miners have tribally combined to enforce a ruinous wage of 12¢ per day — the standard pay for such labor elsewhere in the Congo being 4¢. . . .
Close to Port Francqui and duly inspected by Their Majesties hums Leverville, a famed palm-oil extracting centre of the great British firm of Lever Brothers, "World's Largest Soap Makers." The late, picturesque William Hesketh Lever, who became Viscount Leverhulme, was a favored business crony of Uncle Leopold, and profited accordingly. Quaint was Mr. Lever's presentation to King Leopold II of an ivory box containing the first cake of soap made from Congo palm-oil extracted at Leverville. Uncle Leopold, whom no gift could dazzle, afterwards said that the presentation cake "stank cursedly and wouldn't lather," when he sought to use it "out of compliment to M. Lever." . . .