The Spanish Negro natives, now generally called "Spigs," are slow to learn English, and to what they learn they commonly add the letter "y" thus, "Me no carey for you." And their commonest remark to an American is—"Me no speakity English." Hence "speakity babies" and "Speakities"—the word has come to stay.
"Calzone," which vaguely suggests to the mind undergarments, is very suitable to a swimming population and to those who live in a latitude of steam and heat, but is after all only a derivative from "Canal Zone." But "Calzone" also has perhaps entered the language.
The children of the Canal Zone are numerous. Almost the chief characteristic of the ten-mile-wide strip of the territory is the children. This is first of all due to God and the Government. The United States Government has from the first encouraged the Canal employees to marry; has given rent-free houses to married couples, and generally made it more comfortable for a married man living there with his wife than for the bachelor. The bachelor is always thinking of vacations "back home"; the married man identifies home with the place where he sees his wife and children. The Zone, therefore, is practically settled by people who are at home.
That does not entirely account for the swarms of children. Families are unusually large. There is room for children to kick about in; children fill a larger place in the affections. And then, as a doctor explained to me, "the American woman, tending rather to sterility in the North, is much more fruitful in the Tropics."
"You cannot raise children in India," said he. "But we can in Panama. Do but look around!"
The children are muscular, uncommonly active in wrestling and fighting and leaping and swimming. They afford a surprising contrast to their parents, who show some marks of climate. The children run and struggle with one another and are not annoyed by their profuse perspiration. The parents sit and watch the thousand beads of moisture forming on their bare arms. The parents do not stir but to take a cab; the children chase hoops and hop along with scooters. Certainly the children show a surprising development—many of them learn to dive and swim at four years old, but at nine years you'll sometimes see boys and girls with limbs surprisingly hairy. Children also reach maturity earlier than in the North, and perhaps this brilliant rising generation of Calzones will be as pale and passive as the grown-ups by the time they are thirty.
"There are men here who have missed many ships," I was told. They book a berth, and then, when the time comes, forget; go to the Shipping Company's office and exchange for a berth on the next ship, and then forget again.
Most army and naval officers carry notebooks to aid their memories on routine. Apathy, listlessness, no doubt, is the chief danger in Panama, and that being a spiritual danger it is more to be regarded than the material danger of disease. You notice the difference when you arrive in Panama from the North. You stride, you rush, you soak out your clothes with perspiration, you overtake everybody, you hustle the shop keepers, drink a whole glass in a bar whilst your neighbor has merely sipped. You are completely out of step. Then you pause and reflect; you decide to slow down, and the heat does the rest; you are soon going as slowly as any man who has missed ships.
Nevertheless the American flag does not wave listlessly. The Stars and Stripes is no jungle flag. It is the flag of business, of hustle, of enterprise. It will not droop in the tropics but lift to the trade. Whilst the climate slows down the Anglo-Saxon American it can never slow him down to the level of the Spanish-American. The Panamanians and the "Spigs," the lighter and the darker Spaniards, breeds, half-breeds, or forest-mongrels, have had all nationhood sweated out of them. They claim no affiliations with Spain or with anything bigger than themselves. But the Americans of the Zone are one with a hundred million of kith and kin, one with the Union of forty-eight States, one with their President and with the New York Times and with the Army which is always with them, and with the Navy which comes and goes.
The Calzone people are prouder of America than are most Americans who live in the States themselves. They are like the British Colonials, the Australians, the Jamaicans, and the rest, who are prouder of the Union Jack than those who