Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem

by William Archer

A Negro State.

What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land.

Is this physically possible? Is there enough unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost. According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—

Lower California might be secured. The lands west of Texas may be had. But the Government does not need to purchase. Four hundred million acres of Government land is yet untaken and undeveloped in the West. Of these vast acres the expert hydrographer of the Interior Department has reported that it is easily possible to redeem by irrigation enough to support in plenty a population of sixty million people.

We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of the existing distribution of territory.

It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after which it shall be competent for the various State governments[^[70]] forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new conditions.

The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South. Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to make it continuous, yet not excessive.

There seems to be little doubt that the negro race, as a whole, would welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to live under any other than the American form of government. In the new State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some provisional government like that of an American territory or English crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary. Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally, no coloured man could vote or hold office in the white States.[^[71]] The abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution of the United States a constant source of trouble.

I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial before the eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands, and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.

“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American, inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man, white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep themselves to themselves?

If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union. The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.

And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know! You cannot understand!”[^[72]] He has to confess, too, that there is much in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected. Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.

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[47]. Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p. 230) points out that “the Latin’s prejudice of colour is nowhere as strong as the Teuton’s.” In the same excellent book I find this sentence quoted from “The Foundations of Sociology,” by Professor E. A. Ross: “North America from the Behring Sea to the Rio Grande is dedicated to the highest type of civilisation; while for centuries the rest of our hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of hybridism.”

[48]. I jot down almost at random, as they occur in my notes, a few statements on the population question.

Mr. W. B. Smith, author of “The Colour-Line” (a strongly anti-negro book), makes out that the negro population has since 1860 increased by about 1,100,000 per decade. Thus, in 1860, it stood at 4,400,000, and in 1900 at 8,800,000. Meanwhile the number of negroes per thousand of the whole population has been steadily declining. In 1860 it was 141 per thousand; in 1900 only 116.

In the census of 1900, which gave the total population of the United States as 75,994,575, the coloured population was set down at 9,185,379, or 12·1 per cent.; but as the term “coloured” included 351,394 Indians and Mongolians, the actual number of negroes is reduced to 8,833,985. The coloured population of the South Atlantic and South Central States is given at 8,001,557; and as Indians and Mongolians are few in these regions, we may take it that the number of negroes was nearly eight millions. The white population of these States numbered 16,521,960, of whom only a little more than 2 per cent. were foreign-born, as against 22·5 per cent. in the North Atlantic division, and 15·8 per cent. in the North Central division. But, no doubt, the next census will show a much higher percentage of foreign-born whites in the South. See tables in “The Present South,” by E. G. Murphy.

From a carefully argued statistical paper by W. F. Willcox in Stone’s “Studies in the American Race Problem,” it appears that, taking periods of twenty years together, the percentage of increase in the negro population of the United States has steadily declined. In 1800-1820 it was 76 per cent., in 1880-1900 it was only 34 per cent. Mr. Willcox places the “maximum limit of probable negro population a century hence” at 25,000,000, and thinks that by that time the negroes will constitute only 17·8 per cent. of the population of the Southern States, instead of 32·4 per cent. as at present.

[49]. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the third chapter of “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” takes a pessimistic view, arguing that the apparent progress of the coloured population is “confined to the upper fraction of the race,” while “the other nine-tenths, far from advancing in any way, have either stood stagnant, or have retrograded.” His argument leaves me unconvinced; and I think he gives too much weight to the evidence of Mr. William Hannibal Thomas, author of “The American Negro,” whose invectives against his own race are too virulent to be accepted without the utmost caution.

[50]. There seems to be no doubt that the economic and social future of the South must be radically influenced by the campaign against the hookworm—uncinaria—which, financed by Mr. Rockefeller, is being actively set on foot. This intestinal parasite, which works its way in through the skin, has only of late years been recognized and studied; and as yet scarcely a beginning has been made in that cleansing of the polluted soil which is the obvious and only method of mastering the pest. Both races suffer from it, but the negro far less than the white; and it is said that the laziness and shiftlessness of the “po’ white trash” of the South is almost entirely due to the terrible anæmia produced by its ravages. If this “poor white” population could be converted from two million degraded paupers into as many healthy and industrious citizens, the effect on the labour-market would certainly be far-reaching. The disease ought to be a comparatively easy one to stamp out; and, even when infection has occurred, it commonly yields, in early stages, to a simple treatment.

[51]. See foot-note, p. 190. The American use of the word “conservative,” as employed above, is curiously illustrated in this sentence from “The American Race Problem,” p. 247: “The position of the more conservative, or liberal, section of opinion was that of attempting to show the folly and injustice of attacking Roosevelt by an argument based upon a comparison of the number of negro appointments during his and McKinley’s administrations.”

[52]. In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that the hookworm—that “vampire of the South”—is now pretty clearly proved to be an importation from Africa. On the other hand, it is a far greater scourge to the white than to the black race, the negro possessing a power of resistance to its ravages which amounts almost to immunity.

[53]. “It has become the fashion of late for certain negro leaders to talk, in conventions held outside the South, of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.”—T. N. Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 281.

[54]. This distinction is illustrated by the anecdote of a negro in a Northern city going from door to door of a long street, asking for work and food, and being everywhere met by a polite and regretful refusal. At last he came to a door which was flung open by a man, who thus addressed him: “You d——d black hound, how have you the impudence to come to the front door! Go to the back door, ask for a broom, and sweep out the yard.” “Bless de Lord!” said the negro, “He’s led me to my own Southern people at last!”

[55]. Negro labour is indispensable to the South only inasmuch as the negro has kept and keeps out the white labourer. “Should the negro be deported, there would be no trouble in filling his place with white men, who would bring the South up to its proper agricultural standard.” William P. Calhoun, “The Caucasian and the Negro,” p. 15. Mr. A. H. Stone, a large employer of negro labour, writes: “It has been the curse of the South for a hundred years that her people have clung, and stubbornly, to a conviction, never reasonable or well-founded, that negro labour was essential to the cultivation of her soil.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 174.

[56]. See foot-note, p. 64.

[57]. Mr. Booker Washington said to Mr. Wells: “May we not become a peculiar people—like the Jews? Isn’t that possible?” What so long kept the Jews a peculiar people was the constancy with which Jewish women declined to intermingle with the Gentiles around them. If negro women showed such a spirit of racial chastity, the problem would be very different.

[58]. On p. 47 of “Race Adjustment,” by Mr. Kelly Miller, a coloured professor at Howard University, the author says, addressing Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., “You are mistaken. The negro does not ‘hope and dream of amalgamation.’... A more careful reading of the article referred to would have convinced you that I was arguing against amalgamation as a probable solution of the race problem. I merely stated the intellectual conviction that two races cannot live indefinitely side by side, under the same general régime, without ultimately fusing.” For practical purposes, the difference is not great between “hoping and dreaming” of amalgamation, and merely looking forward to it as inevitable.

[59]. Of course this does not imply that many individual negroes would not be as unwilling as any white man or woman to marry outside their colour limits.

It is on the whole very difficult to state my point in the above paragraph, without seeming to imply a great deal more of conscious and formulated will than I am, as a matter of fact, assuming. There are doubtless thousands of negroes who oppose a race-pride of their own to the race-pride of the whites, and hundreds of thousands who have no conscious desire whatever regarding the future of their race. I am trying to state what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be deep instinctive tendencies, which seldom, perhaps, emerge into consciousness.

[60]. This I wrote from deep conviction, yet with a certain sense of daring; for I thought the idea entirely my own, and feared it might give dire offence. More than a year later, I was reassured on reading the following passage in “The Basis of Ascendancy,” by Mr. E. G. Murphy (p. 52): “Much of the South’s talk against the negro has therefore been the South talking to itself; it has been its rebuke, by implication, of those corrupting elements within the limits of its own life which answer to no high policy of social self-respect, to no fine purpose of racial conservation, but which, under the lowest impulses, would degrade the present and betray the future.”

[61]. “The only truly Anglo-Saxon communities in the world to-day are in rural England and the Southern States.” Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 5. It may perhaps not be quite irrelevant to note that I was struck by the immense preponderance of fair hair and complexion among the women of the South. I would almost go so far as to say that, with the exception of women who had obviously a negro strain in their blood, I did not see a single brunette in the course of my wanderings. As regards Louisiana, this no doubt only means that I had not time or opportunity for adequate observation. But in the case of the other States, I am inclined to think there must be good grounds for the strong impression left on my mind.

[62]. Jean Finot: “Race Prejudice,” London, 1806, p. xv.

[63]. There is some conflict of evidence as to whether many persons of negro blood “cross the line” or “go over to white”—that is to say conceal and renounce the negro strain in their ancestry. Mr. Kelly Miller states that, as a result of white persecution, “hundreds of the composite progeny are daily crossing the colour-line and carrying as much of the despised blood as an albicant skin can conceal without betrayal.” (“Race Adjustment,” p. 49.) “Hundreds daily” is probably an exaggeration; but it would appear that such cases are not infrequent; and it is significant that negroes generally, instead of resenting this disloyalty to their blood, enter into “a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the negro who crosses the line.” “Such cases,” says Mr. Stannard Baker, “even awaken glee among them, as though the negro thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.”

[64]. “One day, while walking in one of the most fashionable residence districts of Atlanta, I saw a magnificent gray stone residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who was a resident of the city:

“‘That’s a fine home.’

“‘Yes; stop a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you about that. The anti-kink man lives there.’

“‘Anti-kink?’ I asked in surprise.

“‘Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here. He made his money by selling to negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks out of their wool. They’re simply crazy on that subject.’

“‘Does it work?’

“‘You haven’t seen any straight-haired negroes, have you?’ he asked.”—Ray Stannard Baker.

[65]. This volume contains portraits of ninety-seven contributors to it, whom I have roughly classified according to their features and apparent complexion. There are only three whom one can put down as probably pure negroes. Of the remainder, twenty-three seem to be predominantly negroes, but clearly not pure-bred; thirty-four are typical mulattoes (that is to say, appear to be half black, half white); in thirty-three the features are almost entirely Caucasian, but the complexion is unmistakably swarthy, while in five there is scarcely any recognizable trace of negro blood. The decoration round the portraits in this book is curious and instructive. It consists of a scroll-work encircling two pairs of contrasted medallions. On the one side we have a black slave being flogged, on the other a very light mulatto writing in a study, surrounded with books; on the one side a negro kneeling with broken fetters on his wrists, on the other a frock-coated mulatto on a platform, with an ice-water pitcher on his table, lecturing with gesticulation to a crowded audience.

[66]. “What evil spirit has come upon the present-day Afro-American that a people who, from the days of Homer until this generation, have borne the epithet of ‘blameless Ethiopians’ should now be accused as the scourge of mankind?” Kelly Miller (coloured), “Race Adjustment,” p. 77.

[67]. I do not dwell on his surely unadvised initial statement that the “barriers” between white and black “are not different in kind or in strength from those which once separated neighbouring European tribes.” I presume that “once” must be taken as referring to pre-historic ages, reconstructed on scanty ethnological evidence.

[68]. Yet I cannot but call attention once more to the doubt even on this point. See p. 108. The general manager (a Canadian) of the company which laid down the street-car lines in Kingston, Jamaica, reported that “the best and most reliable of the workmen were the pure blacks. This was found to be invariably the case.”—W. P. Livingstone, “Black Jamaica,” p. 182.

[69]. Several of my critics, when this essay first appeared, misunderstood this phrase. I do not mean that if the legal barriers were removed white men would rush to marry black women. What I mean is that, in a democratic community, the legal barrier could not possibly be removed unless there had previously occurred a relaxation, or rather reversal, of public sentiment with regard to mixed unions.

[70]. I assume that, the principle once accepted, there will be small difficulty in arranging the respective rights and duties in this matter of the central and the State governments. The colour problem is a national concern, if ever there was one.

[71]. The negro State would, of course, send to Congress its two Senators and its due proportion of members of the Lower House.

[72]. “I know of no other community of white people of equal numbers in the world to-day carrying the burden borne by those of the Southern States.... I mean the burden of ... administering the same law for the two most diverse races on earth; of so carrying themselves in the various relations of daily life with these childish people that their conduct may have the approval of their consciences; of living with a due regard for the opinions of their fellow-men, the while oppressed by the consciousness that their fellow-men do not, will not, or cannot understand.”—A. H. Stone, “The American Race Problem,” p. 74.

PART III

HAVANA TO PANAMA

I
THE AMERICAN IN CUBA

I have known few more curious sensations than that of crossing in a single night from Florida to Cuba: leaving the New World at ten p.m. and arriving at six a.m. in the Old World. For Havana is distinctly an Old World city—more so, I am told, than some of the cities of modern Spain. From the moment the steamer passes between Morro Castle and La Punta, and skirts beneath the grey and pink cliffs of the huge idle fortress of La Cabana, one feels that one has left behind the region of the Immature, and entered upon that of the Over-ripe.

I am not going to attempt a description of Havana, with its many-coloured, swarming Southern life; its arcaded side-walks; its huge windows, all barred with ornamental ironwork, at which a great part of the social life of the city is carried on; its narrow business streets, the Calle Obispo and Calle O’Reilly, in which the frequent awnings stretched from house to house create a rich golden shade; its grey old cathedral; its cool green patios framed in the gloom of high-arched gateways; its handsome, rather commonplace, modern squares; its Prado and its esplanade, where the restless purple waters of the Gulf of Mexico fling up, every now and then, white pillars of spray. Except for its splendid harbour, the city has no great advantage of situation, being placed on low hills, and surrounded by others not much higher. The chief impression it leaves on the mind is that of opulent colour—often garish where the hand of man has held the brush, but, where Nature has her own way, in tree, shrub, soil, ocean, and sky, indescribably and inexhaustibly gorgeous. A painter of the temperate zone would here throw away his palette, except, it may be, for the wonderful blue distances, of which, on the outskirts, one has now and then a glimpse.

A Paradise Regained.

From all that I could see and hear in Cuba, I felt thoroughly convinced that American intervention had amply justified itself, and that this noble island, after all its miseries and distractions, was now in a fair way to become as prosperous and happy as, by its natural advantages, it is entitled to be. The splendid work of cleansing and sanitation which the Americans have done in Havana I more fully appreciated after a brief inspection of a couple of unsanitated Spanish-American towns—Cartagena and Barranquilla. But cleaning-up and road-making, and the organization of public services, are not all that the Americans are doing. In the Cuban guide-book it was significant to note the number of places which owed their fame to having been the scene of this or that massacre or military execution. It would be premature, perhaps, to say that all that sort of thing is past and done with; but there will certainly not be much more of it; the United States will see to that. I am bound to confess that here, in my opinion, the Republic has “taken up the white man’s burden” very efficiently and in a very true sense.

The sense of prosperity was very strongly borne in upon me in Vedado, a suburb of Havana, whither I went to call upon an American gentleman, resident for many years in Cuba, to whom I had an introduction. Vedado is a great sun-baked stretch of ground between the low hills and the sea to the west of Havana, where handsome bungalow-villas are rising in great numbers. As yet it is in a somewhat raw and ragged condition; but there is evidence of wealth and activity on every hand.

The Cuban Colour-Line.

My primary object in visiting Mr. Ogden (as I shall call him) was to inquire into the relations of the white and coloured races in Cuba.

“It is very obvious,” I said, “in the streets of Havana, that, if there is any colour-line here, it is not drawn anything like as strictly as in the Southern States. I see a good many black policemen; and there are black motor-men and conductors on the street-cars. Among the passengers in the cars there is no distinction of colour. In the Colon Cemetery, as I came down here, I noticed that, among the thirty heroes commemorated on the Firemen’s Monument, four seemed to be pure negroes; and there were negro traits in six or seven more. Is there really no colour discrimination at all?”

“In the sense of legal disability,” said Mr. Ogden, “there is none. Socially, of course, there is a good deal, though no hard-and-fast barrier is raised between the races. Each family, each individual, draws the colour-line according to taste. But, naturally, there is a tendency for the pure white to exclude the unmistakably coloured.”

“Would a white man lose caste on marrying a coloured woman?”

“Oh, very distinctly. I could tell you of several instances.”

“But there is no serious friction—no feud—between the races?”

“At present, no; but I’m not at all sure that a race problem may not declare itself when the new Constitution comes into force in February next. We shall then have the negro in politics; and that is how trouble always arises.”

“You fear a Cuban repetition of the Reconstruction time?”

“Yes, indeed I do. The negro is susceptible to every sort of political machination. Every carpet-bag demagogue can make a tool of him, and that the Cuban white men won’t stand for.”

“Meanwhile, however, there is no trouble? You have not any such Reign of Terror here as there is some parts of the Southern States?”

“No. Outrages on women are practically unknown here.”

“And how do you account for the difference between Cuba and the Southern States in respect to this class of crime?”

“Well, sir, I’m a Southern man myself, and all I can say is that the nigger here don’t seem to me the same as he is at home. I believe it is partly a real difference of race. |The Pick of the Basket.| You see, most of the slave-ships used to touch at Havana before they went on to Charleston or New Orleans; and the Cuban planters used to make a study of the different races and tribes, and select the best types. The daughter of a very wealthy planter—she’s an old lady now—has told me all about it. They knew precisely the qualities of the different breeds. Some were best fitted for body-servants, some for field-work, some for handling stock, others for educating and making clerks and book-keepers of. So, you see, the Cubans got the pick of the basket, and only the lower class—the mere brawny animals—got to the United States.”

This theory did not strike me as wholly adequate to the case, nor did Mr. Ogden pretend that it was. But there may be something in it, and I commend it to the notice of students of negro ethnology.

“By-the-by,” Mr. Ogden continued, “there is a curious African survival among the negroes here—a sort of semi-religious society called the Ñanigo, which indulges in strange rites of its own, and occasionally in assassination.”

“When you say ‘semi-religious,’ do you mean Christian or pagan?”

“Oh, pagan entirely. The members are generally tattooed or decorated with scars and cicatrices. They come greatly to the front in Carnival time, when they parade the streets, carrying a sort of illuminated pagoda and making strange noises by grating gourds.”

The Political Situation.

The talk then strayed to politics, and Mr. Ogden gave me a no doubt one-sided, but evidently sincere, view of the situation.

“I take it,” said I, “that Cuba is now peaceful and contented?”

“Oh yes, fairly so,” said Mr. Ogden; “but capital is still shy of coming in, until the political condition is more stable.”

“What was the reason of President Palma’s downfall?”

“The sole reason was that he was too good for them—too honest, too scrupulous. Ninety-five per cent. of those who took active part in the revolution of 1906 were negroes, and the rest were, with very few exceptions, men of no standing whatever, either political or social.

“The revolution was largely worked by the editor of a popular paper, a very able man whose sole moral quality is a total lack of hypocrisy. He said quite frankly, ‘In the old days I was always in touch with the Spanish Governor, and all sorts of good things came my way. Now, on the other hand, there’s nothing doing, and it don’t suit me.’ For a short time I ran the English page of his paper for him; and once, when he wanted me to put in something that I knew to be a blazing lie, I said to him, ‘I wonder how you can reconcile it with either your principles or your policy to print such an utter falsehood.’ He slapped his right pocket, and said, ‘My principles are here;’ his left pocket, ‘and my policy here.’

Engineering a Revolution.

“The chief of the secret service had warned Palma for some time that a revolution was brewing—that there was open talk in the cafés of his assassination or deportation. He only said, ‘Why, what is there to make a revolution about? Our credit is good, our public works are going forward, prosperity is spreading. Where should the revolution come from?’

“A party of men were suborned to enter the barracks of a company of rural guards, shoot all the men in their sleep, and seize their arms. This was to be the signal for a general rising; but the bandits were left in the lurch by their friends. Orders were given to take them alive or dead—preferably dead. Unfortunately they were taken alive, and have all been released by Mr. Taft, on the plea that their offence was political.

“Then a man got up a revolution in a remote province; which meant that he set a lot of niggers looting stores and carrying off canned salmon, and calico, and boots and shoes. A friend of his in Havana went down to find out the reason of this revolution. The leader explained that he had 7000 dollars of gambling debts which he couldn’t pay; and for that sum he would order off the revolution. The friend said: ‘You can’t have 7000, but I know of 3000 dollars allotted for a purpose that can stand over; I think I can get you that, and you can make a composition with your creditors.’ The leader agreed to this proposal, but Palma refused to sanction the deal, and the rising went on, and spread, and became serious.

“Palma confessed to me that the only troops he could rely on had only a few rounds of ammunition. |A Foreign Legion.| ‘Why, then,’ said I, ‘there’s only one thing to be done—we’ll telegraph to the Colt Manufacturing Company for twenty machine guns and a million rounds of ammunition; and I’ll organize the men to work them.’ Palma held up his hands in protest. ‘A million rounds! Why, that’s enough for a war!’

“The Colt Company could only deliver ten machine guns, but those we got; and I organized a foreign legion. It contained Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians—450 men in all. We were just ready for business when Mr. Taft arrived with the Peace Commission; and what followed I have never understood, and don’t understand to this day.

“We went on board the Des Moines to wait on Mr. Taft. He said to me, ‘Mr. Ogden, I understand you are an American citizen—then what are you doing in that uniform, and under arms? And that man there? And that man there?’ I replied, ‘Mr. Taft, I have lived in Cuba twelve years. This gentleman is an Englishman—he has been fifteen years here. This gentleman is French—he has been twenty years here. We have wives and children here; and we have formed ourselves into a foreign legion, because we think we have a right to protect our families and to preserve the peace.’

“‘What do you want me to do?’ said Mr. Taft. |Muzzling the Machine-Guns.| ‘The very thing you won’t do,’ said I. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘I’m a reasonable man, and I’m here to do something. How do you know it mayn’t be what you want?’

“‘Well, sir,’ said I, ‘we want you to sit still, and smoke your cigar, and do nothing.’

“‘For how long?’

“‘For twenty-four hours—at most for forty-eight.’

“‘And meantime,’ said he, ‘you propose to keep the peace by committing an act of war?’

“‘It won’t be war, sir,’ I said. ‘These people can’t stand up for a minute before machine guns. It isn’t in them. In the first place, they haven’t more than six or eight rounds of ammunition apiece, and you know you can’t make war with six rounds of ammunition. But I don’t care though they had a million rounds—they simply cannot stand up. There’s no reason why they should. There’s no patriotism, no principle among them. They’re merely out for a little loot. If you tie our hands, and give the country over to this gang, Cuba will stink to heaven before many months are over.’

“But it was no use. Palma had to go, and now we don’t know what lies before us.

“It isn’t that the Cubans aren’t fit for political life. Many of them are, perfectly. But with the ignorant negro and low white vote, there is no saying what may happen.

“I wish to heaven President Roosevelt had just added a few words of postscript to his message to the Cubans. If he had only said, ‘Though we intend that Cuba shall have honest self-government, we don’t propose to put up with revolutions,’ all would have been well.”

II
A GAME FOR GODS

A cloudlessly hot Sunday afternoon in Havana—I am lounging in the Parque Central, when I observe a poster announcing that a game of “Jai Alai” is at that moment in progress. The very intelligent “Standard Guide to Havana,” sold by Mr. Foster (the Cook of Cuba), notes this “famous gambling game” as one of the sights of the city; so I charter a cab, and jog through the baking streets to the “Frontón” in which it is played. You first enter a long and evil-smelling hall, with various refreshment bars, like the lower regions of a hippodrome; and then you pass into the “Frontón” itself. Imagine an amphitheatre sliced in two at its longitudinal axis; one half retained, with its shape unaltered, to serve as the auditorium; the other half converted into a titanic racquet court, 175 ft. long, 36 ft. deep, and (I imagine) something like 40 ft. high. The long wall, of course, fronts the audience, the two short walls close in the ends. The floor of the immense court is made of smooth and almost shining concrete; the walls are of stone, painted chocolate colour, and the long wall is marked off by perpendicular lines into seventeen compartments. The purpose of this I did not understand, for play takes place, not against this back wall, but up and down the whole length of the great court. Imagine, now, the great auditorium, tier on tier, filled with a vast crowd of excited, shouting, cheering men (there were only about a dozen women present), while bookmakers in red Basque caps move up and down in front of the first tier of seats, and permeate the higher tiers as well, yelling the odds in their raucous voices. As a vehicle for betting “Jai Alai” is generally recognized as “a curse to the community,” and the American Governor has been much blamed for tolerating it. But in itself,—as an exercise of skill, endurance, strength, agility, and grace—I do not hesitate to call it out and away the finest game I ever saw.

Readers who have been to Spain may recognize this as the Basque game of pelota. |“Partido” and “Quiniela.”| I had heard its name; but certainly its extraordinary merits had never reached my cars. Probably it is too difficult for the ordinary amateur; the professionals whom I saw are engaged at large salaries, and showed marvellous skill. But as a mere spectacle I should think it would prove attractive anywhere.[^[73]] The game is perfectly simple to understand, and there is never a dull moment in it, except the few moments of rest which the players allow themselves. Here is my guide-book’s account of it:—

Attached to a leather gauntlet worn by the players is a long, narrow, curved basket or cestus (cesta) from which the ball is hurled and in which it is caught. The small ball (pelota) is of indiarubber covered with leather, and weighs about four ounces. The players are distinguished by their dress as whites (blancos) and blues (azules). Two games are played. In one, called a partido, two blues play against two whites. In the other, called quiniela, five players participate, one against another in succession, until the winner shall have scored the game of six points.

The quiniela seemed to me more graceful and beautiful than the partido, or foursome, if not quite so exciting. The players wear the simplest costume—white drill trousers and either white or blue shirts. For a long time I was puzzled to think what familiar object the “cesta” recalled to me; but at last I hit on it—the thing is for all the world like those wicker guards which linkmen put over hansom-wheels, to save the gowns of ladies in alighting. The basket is, I take it, about two feet long. When a player lets his arm drop from the shoulder, the tip of the “cesta” is about level with his ankle.

Now, how shall I describe the actual play? It is racquets enormously magnified, and carried to an almost superhuman pitch of skill. Only once does the player touch the ball with his hand, and that is in leading off. |Playing the Game.| Standing about the middle of the court, he drops the ball on the floor, catches it with his “cesta” in the rebound, and sends it whizzing against the end wall. It flies back like a streak of lightning, and instantly one of the other side has it in his “cesta,” makes two or three leaps to give himself impetus, and hurls it again at the end wall. This time it is not improbable that he has put such force into his cast that the ball rebounds the whole 175 feet, strikes the opposite wall, and flashes down to the floor. Then one of his opponents must be ready to take it on the hop, and, reinforcing its movement, to send it flying once more against the end wall, of course doing his best to “place” it awkwardly for the other side. I have seen the ball returned thirty times in a single rally; but the average number would probably be some twelve or fifteen. And almost every catch and return seemed an incredible feat of skill. Just consider: here is a space of 6300 square feet, and only two players on each side—in the quiniela only one. What astounding rapidity of eye and agility of limb it must take to be always at the right spot to catch a little demon of a ball, that tears flashing about the court like a thing possessed! And the men are almost always at the right spot. They may misplace the ball or send it “out;” but it is the rarest thing for the ball to escape them entirely. They run, they leap, they make the most amazing whirling strokes; if the ball comes very low, they fall down, and often hurl it with the greatest accuracy from the most unconventional positions on the ground. Not once but hundreds of times that afternoon did I see things done that looked absolutely impossible. Perhaps their variety of resource is their most astonishing quality. But, wonderful as it all is, it is still more beautiful. With all their rapidity, their grace is perfect, like that of lithe, resilient, feline animals. If anything more marvellous or more graceful was done at the Olympic games, then the Greeks were athletes indeed.

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 themselves 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!

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[73]. Since writing this I have learnt that pelota has been played both in London and at the St. Louis Exhibition, apparently without much success. Surely it was somehow mismanaged.

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 or 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 they 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 do 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 the 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, spread 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 some 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 seven 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 the 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, and 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 black” 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 that[that] 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 scarcely 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 larceny[larceny].” 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 its 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.

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[74]. In Havana I more than once saw mothers or nurses driving about in cabs, with children entirely naked save that they wore shoes and socks! A curious inversion of European custom.

[75]. “To create an intermediate classification as in Jamaica, and to divide the population into ‘white,’ ‘negro,’ and ‘coloured’ is but to increase the confusions and complexities of the problem ... the irritation between the coloured and negro classes being often quite as great as that between the negro and the white.”—E. G. Murphy, “The Basis of Ascendancy,” p. 43.

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 neat 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.

Besides, 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 they 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 one 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 presented 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 your 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 lying 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 and 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 people—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 description 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 had 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 five 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 we 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 the 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 heard 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.