"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of possible redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: Whatever prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what previous generations have done for increasing man's efficiency by means of knowledge and tools; your first duty to your fellows is to help forward the same agencies for human uplift in the future. And while this is the first duty of the individual, it is even more emphatically the first duty of a community or a commonwealth.
This is Asia's most important lesson for America.
Singapore, Straits Settlements.
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XIX
THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA
The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and in Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer and winter are practically alike.
"But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime," a fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise at not finding it hotter than it really was--the speaker evidently forgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month as July, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with us become the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to the equator that for it "all seasons are summer," and the punkah wallas (the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth of July.
The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on the tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms are silhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavy foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; the sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the city are rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and uncleared jungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the unending {187} life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a long while because of the great number of lions found in the neighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.
There is probably no place on earth in which there have been brought together greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. I was told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversity of color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I am prepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them about as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian in the main--sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black hair; but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is Chinese.