ABSTRACT
Having founded his state and secured its international recognition, Leopold II was faced with a variety of problems. He had to build up an administration and extend its authority across huge territory of which he was now nominally the master. Leopold's only possible recourse was to the financial markets, and his first attempt, launched in the autumn of 1885, was to persuade an international banking consortium to float a Fr. 100 million loan, with returns in the form of lottery prizes. Leopold enlisted Stanley Pool's help, and the latter got together with Mackinnon and Hutton to form a syndicate, based on Manchester, to form a Congo Railway Company. Leopold made vigorous moves to confirm his frontiers. As always, his stance was proactive, and he made various attempts to improve on the imprecise delineations which had been set out in the treaties with Germany, France and Portugal, and in the Note of August 1885 to the powers represented at Berlin Conference.
