PART II THE PROBLEM FACED (continued 2)

Certainly, if one wanted to gamble, “Jai Alai” provides an intensely exciting method of doing so. |The Fluctuating Odds.| In one partido that I saw it seemed at first that the “blancos” entirely outclassed the “azules.” They gained about 8 points to their rivals’ 3—the game being 30 up. But gradually the blues crept forward, until at 14 they tied. Then the whites spurted, and presently the score was 24-19. But again the blues pulled themselves together, and at 26 they again tied. The whites, however, were the better team, and in the end won by 2 points. Of course, at every fluctuation of the score, the odds varied: when the twenties were reached the betting became fast and furious, and both bookmakers and their “clients” shouted 261themselves distracted. But there is no reason in the nature of things why this exquisitely beautiful game should be “soiled with all ignoble use.” How amazing is the brutality of taste that can prefer the bull-fight to pelota!

262

III A FRAGMENT OF FAIRYLAND

Allowing time for a few hours’ stay at Matanzas, the journey from Havana to Santiago di Cuba occupies two days and a night. At Matanzas, a town in itself of no great interest, it is well worth while to climb to the hermitage of Montserrate, which overlooks to the westward the Yumuri valley, a great semicircular basin in the hills, and to the eastward a magnificent sweep of sea and shore. The endless colonnades of palm-trees give to the distant slopes an exquisite tone of silver-blue such as I have never seen anywhere else. On the whole, however, the Cuban landscape, as it presents itself between Havana and Santiago, is rich and spacious rather than specially beautiful. Its characteristic aspect is that of wide and fertile plains, with ranges of high hills, or low mountains, in the distance, dappled with the shadows of the clouds; but in the central province of Camaguëy the hills disappear, and the plains become rather uninteresting, and to a considerable extent unimproved. The general impression of fertility is very striking. The soil is often of such a rich red 263or chocolate colour that it seems as though an artist need only mix a little oil with it and transfer it to his canvas. The species of palm which prevails in Cuba has an unfortunate tendency to bulge in the wrong place, and assume a bottle-like contour, which is fatal to the beauty of the individual trees. Patches of inextricable jungle are not infrequent in the central districts, and suggest a use for the huge, broad cutlasses—the machetes—with which the negro peasantry are generally armed. As the line bends southward to Santiago, I fancy that the scenery becomes more mountainous and picturesque; but we ran through it in the dark. I retain only an impression of dense forests jewelled with myriads of fire-flies, while some sort of cricket or cicala made a pleasant tinkling sound, as though of running water.

Santiago I take to be one of the hottest places in the universe. |Santiago to Kingston.| It is set in a vast basin of splendid hills, the bottom of the basin being formed by the lake-like expanse of the historic harbour. The gulf or fiord so narrows towards its mouth that no sign of the open sea is visible, and no breath of sea breeze seems ever to stir the mirror-like surface of the lake. The red roofs of the town climb up the hill from the water’s edge, and seem to glow and flame in the fierce sunlight. One envied the little brown and yellow urchins running about stark naked in the shady side-streets. If 264they wore anything at all, it was a necklace—an amulet or charm, as I conceive.^[74]

From Santiago I took ship for Jamaica on the S.S. Oteri, the most uncomfortable vessel on which I ever set foot. It belongs, I am told, to the Cuba Eastern Railroad, which is largely an English company. Surely it would pay them to assign a habitable ship to the service, and thus encourage travellers to adopt this otherwise delightful route.

Over the passage I draw a veil. We wound our way down the narrow neck of the fiord (sacred to the memory of the heroic Hobson), passed under the bluff crowned by the bastions of Morro Castle, and plunged into the rollers of a marvellous sapphire sea. From that time, I remember nothing for about eighteen hours, except the truly infernal heat of a grimy little oven, facetiously described as a stateroom. Next morning, when I came on deck, the blue mountains of Jamaica were towering over us, and we were heading for the low spit of Port Royal, which forms, as it were, the breakwater of Kingston Harbour.

Of Jamaica I shall say very little, for the simple reason that my feelings concerning it are beyond expression. |The City Desolate.| The burden of my message is, “Go and see it.” Until you have crossed the Blue Mountain range of this incomparable island you 265do not know what Nature can achieve in the creation of pure beauty. In Italy Nature is helped out by art, by architecture, by the magic of antiquity, by all sorts of historic associations; and it would, of course, be ridiculous to under-value these advantages. Here beauty has no such adjuncts; if it is enhanced at all by the intervention of man, it is by mere accident. Comparison, then, is futile; but with the liveliest memory of many of the loveliest scenes in Italy, I say deliberately that I did not know what pure beauty meant until I visited Jamaica.

But I did not learn it in Kingston. Rebuilding had scarcely begun in that luckless city, which can at no time, I fancy, be very attractive. It was, to put it briefly, the abomination of desolation. The heat in the long, straight streets was torrid; and all the mortar that ought to have been in the house-walls was blowing about in the form of scorching and stinging dust-clouds. So I presently shook the dust of Kingston, not so much off my feet as out of my eyes and lungs, and (under the advice of kind friends at King’s House), set forth on a short tour, of which the first stage was a railway journey to Port Antonio.

Never shall I forget that afternoon. |A Midsummer Day’s Dream.| Perhaps it impressed me the more because I had not been led to expect anything unusually beautiful. Between Kingston and the old capital, Spanish Town, the route was of no great interest; but no sooner had 266the train passed Spanish Town, and begun to creep up into the hills which form the backbone of the island, than I found myself in a valley of enchantment. A gorge rather than a valley—a winding, Highland glen, with a clear blue river flowing musically down its rocky bed, and a white road following the curves of the stream. Everywhere were glorious forest trees and slender palms—very different from the paunchy Cuban species—with an underwood of the richest tropical growths. The banana groves, sometimes mixed with orange trees, were numberless, and at almost every turn huge clumps of feathery bamboos were mirrored in the stream. The giant limbs of the forest trees were often clad for their whole length with the tender green of thick-clustering ferns. As for the temperature, it was perfection. I can only describe it by a contradiction in terms—very warm and yet beautifully cool—whereby I mean that, though the thermometer was doubtless high, the delicate freshness of the air, the clearness of the water, and the depth of the green shadows through which we were running, produced a perfect illusion of coolness. Slowly as the train meandered along, it went far too fast for me. I was tortured by a desire to linger, to get out and walk, to fix in my mind some of the ever-shifting aspects of beauty. Presently—all too soon—we reached the top of the pass and began to wind down the wider valley on the other side. Beneath jag-toothed mountain walls in the grey distance, 267spread a labyrinth of crinkly hills, all tending to a pyramidal form, and many of them crowned with red-roofed cabins or wattle huts. Down their corrugations flowed exquisitely limpid brooks, and up their sides climbed forests of broad-leaved bananas. On every hand were palms, oranges, and brilliant flowering shrubs. It gave one an odd little shock to see at a wayside station, amid all this wealth of tropical colour, a patch of homely British vermilion in the shape of a mail-cart inscribed with the familiar “E.R.” At times the train would plunge into tunnels, just long enough to afford a pleasant pause in the overpowering feast of beauty; then out again to serpentine along amid fairy dells and dingles each lovelier than the last. As we drew downwards, the noble mountain background began to flush in the evening light; and at last we ran out into the wide bed of a torrent debouching in a sweep of purple sea. This was Annotto Bay; whence the line skirts round headland after headland of the romantic coast to the bright little town of Port Antonio.

Here I spent a perfect tropical day. |At Port Antonio.| The great American caravanserai on the promontory between the two bays was closed; so I went to the pleasant little Waverley Hotel on the neck of land at the base of the promontory. Through the still hot hours of blazing sunlight, I sat in the airiest of attire on a shady verandah, writing 268some of the foregoing pages, while the vulture-like “John Crows” wheeled solemnly around, in sedulous devotion to their craft of scavenging. The waters of the smaller bay were lapping at my feet; and I looked out over their blue expanse to a little red-and-white light-house on the opposite head-land, and the white walls of an American millionaire’s villa gleaming through a forest of palms. In the cool of the afternoon, I climbed to a small plantation on the top of a hill some seven or eight hundred feet high, almost perpendicularly overhanging the town. Nothing more glorious can be conceived than the falling of the purple twilight over the innumerable folds of the foothills filling the bottom of the great basin of mountains to the south; while northward lay the measureless expanse of the sleeping Spanish Main. It was a scene of sheer enchantment. I lingered until the great stars began to blaze in the crystal deeps of heaven; then took my way downward, unutterably moved, as by some august and gorgeous ritual. In the town, the lamplight was glowing through the walls of the houses—for here, as often as not, the walls are of pivoted slats which open and close like Venetian blinds. The streets were swarming with a dusky throng, and a band of black Salvationists was making an unholy clatter under the star-sown silences.

But I must cut short my Jamaican raptures, and not attempt to express the inexpressible. Starting from Buff Bay the next morning, at 269seven o’clock, under the guidance of a negro whoso regal name was Clovis, I rode all day long up a valley of paradise, into the heart of the mountains. |A Valley of Paradise.| Sometimes, when the road skirted a ravine, we would look down a hundred feet or so, and see shining brown bodies plashing about in the silver pools, flecked with sunlight through the overarching palms. More than once, in some sequestered nook, we came upon a negro family party performing an elaborate go-to-meeting toilet—for it happened to be Sunday, and the road was populous with worshippers, all of whom gave us a grinning good-day. While we took our midday rest at a hospitable plantation, half ruined by the earthquake, a deluge of rain came down and lasted over an hour; but when we rode forward—now on a mere bridle-path winding along the sides of often precipitous gorges—it was wonderful to see the clouds rolling up like giant curtains from the glittering mountain-sides. On we clambered over the watershed, and a little way down the southern valley, to the plantation of Chester Vale, 3000 feet high. There I spent several delightful days of work and mountain wandering, on which I must not allow myself to enlarge. Almost every afternoon—for it was the rainy season—there came a tropical downpour. But rain itself, in this climate, is a thing of beauty and of joy; and as for the lifting of the clouds and breaking through of the evening sun, who shall describe 270the splendours of the spectacle? Perhaps the most beautiful of all my experiences was an early morning ride from Chester Vale along the ridge to Newcastle, on my way back to Kingston. Such ferns, such exquisite wild flowers, as lined the path, I have seen nowhere else; and the view from our shady fringe of the forest, over the sunbathed valley fading away to the northern sea, was sumptuous in the extreme.

I cannot better sum up my impressions of Jamaica than by saying that there was scarcely an hour of my brief stay in the island which I would not willingly have prolonged indefinitely. Again and again—many times in the day—I would feel, “Why cannot the sun stand still? Why must this marvellous moment pass away before I have absorbed a hundredth part of its beauty? Why is there no means of ‘fixing’ on the memory, as on a photographic plate, the details of this heavenly scene?” We have all, I suppose, experienced these moments of exasperation at the tyrannous march of time; but I have never known them come crowding upon me as they did in Jamaica. In a very real sense, the island is too lovely; one is sated, surfeited with beauty. I should hesitate to live there, lest perchance I should sicken of Nature’s prodigality. But for a month or two, or for a winter, nothing could be more fascinating. And Jamaica, in my experience, has few or none of the usual draw-backs of the tropics—poisonous insects, snakes, 271and so forth. It is the nearest conceivable approach to an earthly Paradise. It is a fragment of Fairyland.

To confess the truth, I was too much occupied in sheer enjoyment of life during my stay in Jamaica to pursue with any ardour my researches into the race-problem. |Black, White, and Coloured.| But I saw enough to realize the heaven-wide difference between this black community, administered by a benevolent but scarcely qualified despotism, and the piebald democracies of the Southern States. There were in Jamaica, in 1905, 15,000 whites, ten times as many “coloured” people (that is to say mulattoes), and nearly 630,000 blacks. In other words, the white population of the island is smaller than that of Rugby, the non-white population is larger than that of Manchester and Salford. There are fifty-five non-whites to every one white. Moreover, the terms of the enumeration point to a characteristic difference between the United States and Jamaica. In America, every one with the smallest strain of African blood is black, though he may, in fact, be as white as George Washington. “Coloured man” and “negro” are synonymous, there being no legal, social, or statistical distinction between the pure black and the mulatto. We have seen how impossible it is to arrive at anything but a merely conjectural estimate of the relative numbers of the pure and mixed breeds. But in the West Indies “coloured”“coloured” means “not 272black” as clearly as it means “not white.” The “coloured” population is a middle class between the white aristocracy and the black proletariat; and whereas in America there is almost complete solidarity of feeling and interest between the mulatto and the negro, I am told that in the West Indies the “coloured” man despises the “nigger,” and feels himself immeasurably his social superior.^[75]

This means that no real race-problem exists in Jamaica. There may be a certain amount of marginal friction and unpleasantness where the coloured population, the intermediate stratum, touches the black basis of society on the one hand, and the white upper-crust on the other; but these difficulties are not essentially different from those which necessarily arise in any community which includes a large class of indeterminate social standing. There is, in fact, none of thatthat race rivalry which declares itself where two races are practically equal in numbers and theoretically equal in political status. The integrity and the social position of the white race are absolutely unthreatened. They are, like the English in India, a small body of “sahibs” in a non-white country. The situation in Jamaica, in fact, has 273scarcely an element in common with that of the Southern States.

There are, I believe, some slight stirrings of democratic ambition, and of resentment at their lack of political rights, among the Jamaican populace—especially in the small class of urban negroes. |Let Well Alone?| It would be absurd for me to offer an opinion as to whether they have any substantial and practical grievance. But I confess I could not work up any enthusiasm for the “elevation” of the Jamaican masses. Beyond a little better sanitation, I do not know what they want. They seemed as happy as South Sea Islanders, and much more tenacious of life. Both the coloured population and the black population have nearly doubled within the past half-century. From the point of view of the white employer, no doubt, it is highly desirable that, as Mr. Booker Washington puts it, they should “want more wants:” more civilization would mean more stability and industry, with less inclination to “prædial larcenylarceny.” But from the point of view of the black man himself, the benefits of progress seem far more questionable. I read without the appropriate sense of horror that “not more than half of the native population is effectively reached by religious and educational influences,” and that 60 per cent. of the births are illegitimate. It seems to me that the Jamaican negro enjoys all the advantages of the primitive life without 274its disadvantages, whereas the American negro (broadly speaking) is subjected to all the evils of civilization, while he receives but a disproportionate share of its benefits.

275

IV THE PANAMA CANAL

When, in New York, I was handed a sailing-list of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s boats, I observed that their first port of call, after Jamaica, was Colon. In vain I hurriedly searched the map of the Caribbean Sea, hoping to disguise my ignorance. I had to pocket my pride, and inquire, “Where is Colon?” Afterwards I discovered that Colon was a place of which I had often heard under its earlier name of Aspinwall; for my father, one of the Californian Argonauts, had twice crossed the Isthmus of Darien in the old days.

Under no conceivable name would Colon be an attractive place. It is situated on flat ground (formerly an island) at the bottom of a little bag of a bay; it consists of the ordinary jerry-built two-storey houses of a more or less improvised tropical sea-port; its fringe of palms is meagre and mangy; and it is backed by low and featureless wooded hills.

But, as we steam slowly up to the jetty, what is this cluster of some twenty or thirty 276neat new houses, under a grove of palm-trees away to the right? There is something odd about them, something dark and blind-looking; they seem to have neither windows nor doors. After a little searching of spirit, I realize what they suggest to me—they are like a row of giant meat-safes.

And there, at the point of the spit of land, is a statue—a group of two figures. Now I know where I am, for I have been reading things up a little. This must be the statue of Columbus embracing an Indian maiden, presented by the Empress Eugénie in the palmy days of French ambition regarding the Isthmus; and the houses behind it must be those of the American officials in the settlement of Cristobal, a suburb of Colon.

One soon learns to appreciate the “screened” houses of the Canal Zone, with their verandahs enclosed in an impervious veil of wire gauze. But outwardly, and especially at a distance, they are not things of beauty.

Three minutes in the broiling streets of Colon were quite enough for me. I have seen frontier settlements before now; and Colon, though it has a sort of a history, is at present, to all intents and purposes, a frontier settlement. “Do you know Port Said?” a resident said to me; “Well, this place is just about 50 per cent. wickeder.” I think the resident (with pardonable partiality) exaggerated a little; but the aspect of Colon, even by day, was quite sufficiently sinister.

277Besides, I had an important introduction to present at Panama; so I took the first train thither. This railway, or at any rate a railway more or less on the line of this one, was built in the ’fifties, and is said to have cost a life for every tie (Anglice, sleeper). Literal-minded persons question this statement; to me it seems entirely probable. For if ever there was a pestiferous-looking region, it is this land of swamp and jungle and blood-red river. Though I knew that science had practically annulled the evil spell that had so long rested on it, there were still places which I could scarcely look at without a shudder.

Of course the Canal works, and the settlements of the workers, give an air of great animation to many points on the line. But apart from these I saw not a single sign of life on the whole route; not a square inch of cultivation, not a man or woman who looked like a peasant of the region; only a few undaunted cattle browsing here and there in the swamps. And every here and there, to add to the desolation, lay great pieces of machinery—travelling cranes, trucks, even engines—overturned by the wayside and half submerged in jungle. They were relics of the French fiasco, the abandoned impedimenta of De Lesseps’ Moscow. I have seen few more tragic spectacles.

Here let me say, however, that intelligent Americans speak with great respect of their French predecessors. “Consider the difficulties 278they had to deal with,” a high official said to me—“difficulties that we have had practically swept away for us! They knew nothing of tropical hygiene, and malaria and yellow fever had it all their own way with them. They knew nothing of cold storage, and the problem of supply was practically insoluble. Considering all these circumstances, it is wonderful what they did, and did well. If it bears a small proportion to the £50,000,000, more or less, that were sunk in the enterprise, you must remember that probably not half that sum of money ever got to the Isthmus. Their material was all excellent. We use a considerable amount of it to this day. We have dug many of their locomotives out of the jungle, and found them practically as good as new. When we took over the business, there was a great outcry over the £8,000,000 we paid to the French Company. People said it was grossly extravagant; but we have found that the bargain was a good one.” Despite all alteration of plans, I gather that about half the excavation actually made by the French has proved, or will prove, useful.

As one leaves the station at Panama, one fears that it is to prove a second Colon. |A Sanitary Campaign.| Here are the same two-storey shanties, half of them, it would seem, drinking-bars, and the other half miscellaneous stores, kept by the ubiquitous Ah Sin and Wong Lee. But after half a mile or so of this Hispano-Americano-Chinatown, the Avenida Central leads 279one into the moderately old and not quite uninteresting Spanish city, with its Plaza, its twin-towered Cathedral, and its fort. And when you get to the fort, you find yourself on the central promontory of one of the most beautiful bays in the world; but of this more anon, from another point of view.

The towns of Panama and Colon are specially excluded from the Canal Zone—the strip of territory extending five miles on each side of the Canal, which the United States has bought from the Republic of Panama for £2,000,000. But even in these two towns the Americans have undertaken the work of paving and sanitation; the outlay to be repaid by instalments extending over fifty years. So they have repeated here the drastic cleaning-up which they have effected in Havana, even outraging the feelings of the natives by abolishing the domestic rain-water butt, the breeding-place of the “Anopheles” and “Stegomyia” mosquitos—disseminators, respectively of malaria and yellow fever. It is mainly, though of course not entirely, by waging war upon these insects that the now almost perfect sanitation of the Canal Zone has been secured. And it is in order to exclude them from the happy home that all the I.C.C.—Isthmian Canal Commission—houses are “screened” with wire gauze.

To one of these houses, in the suburb of Ancon, I drove in the early afternoon, and 280presented my introduction, which was honoured with true American cordiality. Once within the gauze fortification (and the door shuts behind you with a spring, lest you should inadvertently admit a casual Anopheles) you find yourself in a delightfully arranged tropical house, with dining-room and drawing-room opening off a central hall, and with the spacious verandah affording what is equivalent to another suite of rooms. It is built entirely of hardwood, painted in white and shades of green, and is as cool and airy as heart can desire. From within, the “screen” is scarcely noticeable; in the normal Panama weather, indeed, it merely softens agreeably the glare of the sun outside.

“Is this,” I asked, “the famous house that was built in some incredibly short space of time?”

“Yes,” said my host, laughing. “That story has got around a good deal, but it has the merit of being true. When the house was begun, I saw that the workmen were simply dilly-dallying over it and making no way. I spoke to our chief, Colonel Goethals, about it, and he came over and looked at the preparations, so far as they had gone. He said to the overseer: ‘This house must be finished and ready for occupation on the 15th of November’—just six weeks ahead. The overseer pulled a very long face, and said, ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’ ‘That was not my order,’ said Colonel Goethals. ‘I did not tell you to do 281your best—I told you to have the house finished.’ And finished it was, in just thirty-six working days.”

After taking me for a most interesting drive in the environs of Ancon, my host was compelled, by a previous engagement, to leave me to myself for the rest of the evening. |“A Peak in Darien.”| I did the obvious thing, which was to climb Ancon Hill at sunset. To do so you have first to wind your way through the beautifully situated hospital buildings, all, of course, carefully screened in gauze. Straying a little from the proper road, I came across a lumber-yard, outside of which I was a little startled to find a pile of some fifty coffins of assorted sizes. These, too, might, I thought, have been “screened” without disadvantage to the spirits of the community.

A stiff climb of about half an hour brought me to the top of Ancon Hill, and disclosed one of the loveliest views I have ever seen. Immediately below lay the town of Panama on its promontory. To the left a huge bay curved outward, with a magnificent sweep, and beyond it range on range of mountains grew ever dimmer and more distant as they faded away into South America. To the right of Panama lay the smaller bay of La Boca, in which the canal will actually debouch, studded with beautiful mountainous islands, not at all unlike those of the bay of Naples, on a smaller scale. It was a glorious scene; and a white American cruiser 282lying out in the anchorage gave a pleasant touch of life to it.

Observe that I have said “to the left” and “to the right” of Panama, not to the south and to the north; for the orientation here is extremely puzzling. I naturally expected to see the sun set over the Pacific; but, to my great surprise, there seemed to be no sun in the heavens in that direction. Yet the light proved that a sunset was going on somewhere; and, turning inland, I found the luminary engaged in sinking behind the mountains of the Isthmus—to the eastward it seemed to me. A study of a large-scale map may show the reason for this paradox—I shall not attempt to expound it.

The Isthmian Canal Commission has built and runs a delightful tropical hotel at Ancon, called—heaven knows why—the Tivoli. |The Tivoli Hotel.| Even the negro waiters wear at their belt the brazen badges or checks showing their numbers on the I.C.C. pay-list. Salaries are paid to numbers, not to names. Many of the labourers have no ascertainable, or no spellable, name; many change their names as the fancy strikes them; but their badge identifies them at once.

The telephone in my bedroom rang at 5.30 the next morning, for I had to catch a train at 6.35 to meet my Ancon friend at Culebra, several stations down the line. On the way, I saw a gang of black convicts working at an embankment. The black 283and white stripes of their trousers were conspicuous: less conspicuous the chain attaching one leg of each man to a large bullet. A negro in khaki uniform stood sentry over them with fixed bayonet.

There is, it appears, surprisingly little serious crime in the Zone. There are three district judges, who, sitting in banc, form a supreme court. Trial by jury has recently been introduced, on the theory that the Constitution follows the flag. Two cases have been tried by jury: in the first a white man was acquitted who ought (said my informant) to have been found guilty; in the second, a negro was (justly) convicted with promptitude and despatch.

After breakfast at the delightful house of one of the officials at Culebra, my kind cicerone and I sallied forth to visit the famous Culebra Cut. But, while waiting for our motor to appear, he showed me two of the characteristic institutions of the Zone.

A Club House.

The first was an I.C.C. Club House—a spacious and admirably arranged recreation-home, containing a library, reading and writing rooms, billiard-room, gymnasium, skittle alley, and theatre for amateur performances and minstrel shows.

“The great enemy we have to fight,” said my friend, “is not the climate, and still less disease, but the monotony of the life. You cannot get good work out of discontented and homesick 284people—you cannot even retain their services. So it has been one of our most essential tasks to organize amusements, and make the leisure time of our people agreeable. This Culebra club-house is one of four already built, at the cost of about £7000 apiece. The others are at Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal; and we have four or five more in contemplation.”

“And to whom are the club-houses open?”

“To all Gold Employees; and the dues are only one dollar a month.”

The Gold Employee means, on the face of it, the man or woman whose salary is calculated in United States currency, while the Silver Employee is the labourer, white or black, who works at so much an hour, calculated in the currency of Panama, in which a dollar is equal to just half the American or gold dollar. But to all intents and purposes, so far as I could make out, the Gold Employee is the white American, the Silver Employee is everybody else. There are 6000 American employees of the Commission; and, counting officials of the Panama Railway and women and children, there are altogether about 12,000 Americans on the Zone. The total number of employees varies considerably, but is somewhere about 40,000.

The second institution to which my friend introduced me was a Commissary Store, of which there are half a dozen in the Zone. In this large and roomy building commodities of every 285description are dispensed to employees of the Commission. I say dispensed, for nothing is bought for money. |A Socialistic Store.| Everything is paid for by coupons various values, issued to employees alone—the object being to ensure that none but they shall benefit by the institution. As the region is almost wholly unproductive, everything has to be imported from New York, New Orleans, and other points of the United States, from one to two thousand miles distant—the “perishables” being handled by a magnificent system of cold storage. As everything is supplied virtually at cost price, the Canal employee on the average pays for what he consumes rather less than he would in New York.

“But, my dear sir,” I said, as we left the Commissary Store, “this is sheer unmitigated State Socialism.”

“I know it,” he replied, “but I have always thought that Socialism under Carlyle’s ‘benevolent despot’ would be no bad thing. And we flatter ourselves that, in the I.C.C., the benevolent despot has, for once, been discovered.”

Our motor had by this time appeared—a motor running on the railroad—and we set off. |The Culebra Cut.| First we ran down the ordinary passenger track to Las Cascadas; and there, by means of an ingenious portable turntable, we faced about and got ourselves switched on to rails leading to the Cut. Times out of number 286had our motor-man to jump off and turn the points so as to run us into a siding while some huge “dirt train” rumbled past. The rule is that everything must give place to a “business” train. Only for the President of the United States was the line cleared.

Up in the North, an old soldier of the Union, now one of the most delightful of scholars and critics—why should I not name Professor Lounsbury?—had said to me, “I thought that the charge of Pickett’s Brigade, on the third day at Gettysburg, was the greatest sight that I ever had seen or would see; but the Culebra Cut really rivalled it.” I was curious to see where any analogy could lie between two such disparate spectacles; and, frankly, I could find it only in the cannonade of dynamite through which we had occasionally to run. But unquestionably the Cut is a wonderful spectacle, a tremendous demonstration of human and mechanical energy.

It is simply the transformation of a mountain into a valley. Imagine all the biggest railway cuttings you have ever seen ranged into a sort of giant stairway, along the two sides of a great prism-shaped valley; and imagine all these cuttings, at a dozen different levels, being daily and hourly deepened by an army of machines and men. The activity is enormous. Here we have whole companies of drills of various kinds boring the rock to be charged with dynamite; a little farther on we pause at a given signal, and presently come 287five or six detonations, one after the other, like a sharp discharge of artillery. The usual charge is about three hundred pounds; but on one occasion twenty-three tons were used in a single explosion, to blow away a whole hillside. When the ground has been loosened, or “fired,” as they call it, along comes that mammoth earth-eater, the steam-shovel, with its attendant train of dirt-cars, digs its shining steel teeth into the hillside, and munches it up at the rate of five cubic yards to a mouthful. These giant mouthfuls it spits out again one by one into the flat “Lidgertwood” cars on the adjoining track, five or six mouthfuls (I forget the exact number), constituting a carload. The train of some fifteen cars is, in fact, a long platform on wheels; for iron aprons join car to car and make the platform continuous. The cars, moreover, have but one side, so that, when the train arrives at the dumping-ground, a sort of steam plough is dragged by a cable along its whole length, and its huge burden of rock and soil is discharged in a very few minutes. For another consistency of soil, a tilting form of dirt-car is used. In short, no possible time- or labour-saving device is neglected. Even the shifting of temporary railway tracks, which is constantly required, is effected by a machine, which lifts whole sections of rails and “ties,” and deposits them in their new location.

Along the whole length of the Cut we made our way, zig-zagging from level to level. |Engineering Difficulties.| When 288we were in the very bottom of the “prism,” and the two sides of the eviscerated mountain were towering above us, I inquired what was to be the ultimate surface level of the water, and found that the surface level had not yet been reached by many feet.

For about half its length, the Canal will not have the aspect of a canal at all, but of a great lake. The low lands of the northern side of the Isthmus are to be entirely flooded by the damming at Gatun of the Chagres river. This lake-reservoir will have a surface area of about one hundred and ten square miles, and will serve as a regulator of the water supply. For instance, such a sudden rainfall as would cause the Chagres river to rise thirty-five feet in twenty-four hours, will raise the water in the dam only about three inches.

It is whispered in Colon that there is still one great engineering difficulty in the way of the enterprise, and that is to find an adequate foundation for the huge Gatun Dam. Whether such a difficulty exists I cannot say, but, if it does, I am very sure it will be overcome. Croakers also declare that it is well known that the proposed width of the locks at Gatun and La Boca (100 feet) will be quite inadequate for the greater Dreadnoughts and Lusitanias of the future, but that the engineers dare not tackle a larger “proposition.” These are very likely the idlest of rumours. The quidnuncs of Colon do not observe 289the admirable resolution adopted by the Cristobal Women’s Club, namely, “That every club-woman in the Canal Zone constitute herself a committee of one to foster favourable instead of adverse criticism of the conditions of the Zone and of the Isthmus of Panama.”

A Triumph of Organization.

We had just dodged our way through the Cut, when the eleven o’clock whistle sounded, and work ceased for the “noon hour” of eleven to one, essential in this climate. We were thus enabled to make a pretty clear run into Panama. A recent rainfall had left some standing water along the line, and wherever we saw a pool we saw, too, a negro treating it with a can of crude petroleum. The mosquito has indeed a poor time of it in the domain of the I.C.C.

Regretfully I bade my hosts farewell and took the 5.30 train for Colon. As the twilight fell, about midway across the Isthmus, I saw, on the same patch of green, one set of negroes playing baseball, and another set playing cricket. The latter were, of course, Jamaicans, asserting their privileges as citizens of the British Empire. This, I am told, they are very apt to do, in and out of season. The moment they consider their dignity outraged, their retort is, “Let me tell you, sah, I am a British subject.” And, truly, for men of their hue, it is better to be British subjects than American citizens.

It was at Colon, the same evening, that I 290heard those questionings as to the engineering success of the Canal which I have recorded above. Neither of its scientific nor of its political aspects do I profess to judge; but I am much mistaken if the organization of the enterprise be not an achievement of which America has good reason to be proud.

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