But it isn’t—at least not quite. The incarnation of the difference between this and socialism is Col. George W. Goethals. Nobody on the Zone had part in electing Goethals; nobody can say him nay, or abate or hinder in any degree his complete personal control of all that is done here. This is not the co-operative commonwealth we long have sought. Rather is it like the commonwealth of old with Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector—and at that Goethals has no parliament to purge.
Photo by H. Pittier
Courtesy National Geographic Magazine
THE CATASETUM SCURRA
A curiously shaped orchid rediscovered by Mrs. H. H. Rousseau
This is a benevolent despotism, the sort of government that philosophers agree would be ideal if the benevolence of the despot could only be assured invariably and eternally. The Czar of Russia could do what is being done down there were he vested with Goethals’ intolerance of bureaucracies, red-tape, parasites, grafters, disobedience and delay. But Goethals is equally intolerant of opposition, argument, even advice from below. His is the military method of personal command and personal responsibility. I don’t believe he is over-fond even of the council of war. In a socialistic community, where every man had a voice in the government, he would last only long enough for a new election to be called. Though his popularity there is universal, it would not withstand the attacks of demagogues were there field for demagogy.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
MARRIED QUARTERS AT COROZAL
But what has been done, and is still doing, on the Zone is not socialistic, because it is done from the top, by the orders of an autocrat, instead of by an act of a town meeting. One might as well say that the patience, prudence, attention to detail, insistence on proper sanitation which enabled Japan’s great General Nogi to keep his army in the field with the minimum loss from preventable sickness was all socialistic. Col. Goethals commanded an army. The Isthmus was the enemy. The army must be fed and clothed, hence the Commissary. Its communications must be kept open, hence the steamship line and the railroad. The soldiers must be housed, and as it became early apparent that the siege was to be a long one the camps were built of timber instead of tents. There is nothing new about that. Back in the fifteenth century Queen Isabella, concluding that it would take a long time to starve the Moors out of Granada, kept her soldiers busy building a city of stone and mortar before the walls of the beleaguered town. Culebra has been a more stubborn fortress than was ever Granada.