Prowling about Panama

by George A. Miller

Travel is a specific for provincialism, but it must be real travel and not imitation home-swagger. Intelligent and sympathetic travel breaks up the hardening strata of thought, pushes back the narrowing horizon, loosens the set fibers of the soul, and is the surest cure yet known for mental arterial sclerosis. The right kind of travel shifts the viewpoint, readjusts life forces, and shakes up the provincialism of the man with the "township horizon." And when the disturbed atoms of character reassemble it is in a different mode and with a new cycle.

It is to be said that the South American has not taken much interest in us. Since he has made out to get along without us, he cannot be very important. The Oriental has shown some desire to move into our basement, or at least the wood-*shed or the washhouse, and we have discovered him. The European has shown his good taste by coming over and moving right in with us, and in time we cannot distinguish him from ourselves. But the South American has gone his way, and in the main has minded his own affairs, and therefore cannot amount to much. If he were a social problem, we would know him better. If he had a penchant for the police force or an itch for office among us, we would cultivate his acquaintance, and perhaps invite him to call.

During the past two decades the once despised Chinese have become popular among us. Their utter difference from ourselves, their solid human qualities, their marvelous vitality, their commercial solidarity, their response to the stimuli of the modern world, their astonishing versatility, their wonderful national history—these and a hundred other things stir our imagination, and we have rather suddenly discovered that we like the Chinese—especially at a distance.

We are well aware of Japan, not so much through any perceptions of our own as through Japan's insistence upon attention. We can on short notice make out a rather comprehensive list of Japanese characteristics, and, in truth, we find Japan interesting. The marvelous energy of her people, her high ambitions, her Oriental viewpoint, her great commercial and military successes, her artistic setting, her marvelous skill of hand, and, not least, her abundant interest in our own affairs—these and other items make it quite the thing to be interested in Japan. But who cares anything about a lot of dirty peons? They are not in good form.

But this interest in the Orient is more curiosity than it is race sympathy. There is a great gulf fixed between the yellow man and the white, and racially that gulf can never be bridged. The occasional marriages between the East and West need no comment; they tell their own story. Neither China nor Japan can ever become American in any racial sense. When Chinese and Japanese come to America for any but educational and temporary purposes, they set up Chinatown and little Japan wherever they go. American character is a most complicated composite of many races, but from Tokyo to Bombay there is no Oriental factor that will blend with the mixture of races that makes up America.

Our Oriental interest is confined to the races that have impressed themselves upon our imagination. The Philippines, in spite of our national relation to the islands, do not seem to us very real nor very important. They will soon be keeping house for themselves, and then we shall forget them except as an interesting historical incident. And as for India, that is British, and about all we know is that the Hindu wears a turban, maintains a very undemocratic caste, exists in unaccountable numbers, is subject to annoying and frequent famines, and on the whole is a rather helpless lot, except as some bearded fakir entertains companies of badly balanced American society women with hyperbolated essence of sublimated nonsense.

RIVERSIDE PLANTATION

But the Latin-American is blood of our blood, kin of our kind, and lives on the same continental street, which is why we are so little interested in him. He is neither quaint, curious, nor crazy. He is not good for first-page headlines except when he breaks out in revolution or forgets our Monroe Doctrine. There is no fixed gulf of difference between him and us, and in the final fusing of American character he must contribute a large part.

To ignore the Latin-American is to be convicted of historical ignorance. From Dante to the great South American leaders and scholars of to-day the Latin races have been neither sleeping nor idle. During the last five hundred years more than one half of Western history has been made by Latin races. It was a Latin who discovered America. Another first sailed around the globe. Latin peoples explored, conquered, and settled both Western continents, and gave a language which has become the permanent speech of two thirds of the Western world. To call the roll of artists, painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, musicians, explorers, missionaries, and scientists for the past five centuries is to prove that a majority of the names mentioned in the world's illustrious hall of fame are from Latin races. To mention Curé, Pasteur, and Marconi is to remind us of the scientific progress of modern Latin minds, and to speak of France and Italy as pioneers in democracy is to keep within the facts. It was in Italy that Browning and Tennyson and George Eliot and a host of other writers found inspiration and material to feed the fires of genius.