ABSTRACT
On 16 June 1913, the final meeting of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) convened at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel. Delegates from all over the United Kingdom gathered to celebrate the organization’s triumph over a terrible colonial evil. The Association’s Official Organ listed 67 attendees by name; many others attended as well. Observing the Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and Congregational luminaries on the platform, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, one might have thought this was a religious convocation. Aristocrats, MPs, former colonial governors, newspaper editors, and philanthropists rounded out the gathering. Sir Gilbert Parker, the Canadian-born novelist and Conservative Member of Parliament, opened the meeting by praising his fellow MPs as a victorious army—one that had fought for human dignity and against criminal behavior. This army, he observed, had united different parties, political beliefs, and religions, in unspoken contrast with the divisive Boer War. Their arguments over Britain’s behavior in that war had been subsumed in a cause they could agree on: the battle for justice in the Congo. Parker reminded attendees that both Houses of Parliament had taken up the question for ten years without regard for party allegiances.
