The ignorant native hears an intolerable burden of superstition. His contact with the form of church life that exists in these towns is mainly expressed in the celebration of occasional fiestas and the payment of fees for services rendered, and supposed in some way to benefit the contributor or his dead relatives. If "the test of a religion is its results upon a people," then the impartial observer must draw his own conclusions.
INTERIOR MEAT MARKET
That these interior towns are intensely conservative is to be expected. How could it be otherwise than that the methods of the fathers should be good enough for the sons? If human progress is not the result of dominant inner forces resident in human nature, but comes from the application of external stimuli, then the Panamanian may have some excuse for his situation, in a social history that has afforded little incentive for exercise of enterprise or industry.
THE FLAVOR OF OLD SPAIN
If the far interior of Panama is to be judged by present industrial efficiency, the case is lost before the trial begins. General absence of everything that marks a high grade of living emphasizes the failure of the status quo. Incompetence, bad management, childishness cry aloud from rotting buildings, rusting machinery, neglected plantings, impassable "roads," and impossible officials. Streets knee-deep in mire, mud-floored houses, through which pigs wander at will, shiftlessness, dirt, insanitation are the register of the wet season in interior Panama. The outstanding church building is often itself dirty and disheveled. Sidewalks exist only as balconies for individual houses, and vary in height at the caprice of the builder, making the middle of the street the only convenient highway for the passers-by.
The bulk of this out-of-the way business is handled by the ever-present Chino with his little tienda. If there is no Chinese store in the town, it is because the town is too poor to support one. Business involves effort and industry, both distasteful to the native, but breath-of-life to the Chinese.
Inspection of some native towns creates the impression that everybody just sits around all day. Along the streets the people lounge the idle hours away. Hundreds of young men lie about, rocking in chairs, lying in hammocks, hanging about corners. Women slowly move about their household duties, but the men are experts at the rest cure, and scarcely move at all. Once a young man gets a pair of shoes and a necktie, his industrial career abruptly terminates, and thenceforth he toils not, neither does he spin. He has arrived and is content.