Another American in Spain, A. I. Wright, writes from Seville. He has compared the United States with other lands, and tells us some reasons why we should be glad of our origin and birthright as Americans:

I have lived abroad (in Spanish America and in Spain) for about fifteen years. Two fine things I have gotten out of it:

First, the comprehension that nationality is not a question of the geographical location of the particular place where a man hangs his hat. Nationality is a formation of mind. Americans are not merely 100,000,000 people located north of Mexico, south of Canada, between Coney Island and the Cliff House. Americans are people who, no matter where they happen to be drinking ice water, "think American" regardless of environ

ment.

U. S. AS SEEN BY AN AMERICAN ABROAD

Second, residence abroad has given me wide tolerance. I have never seen any country that did not surpass my own-on a point or two. On the On the whole my own so far surpasses every other that I

can well afford to admit their excellencies. No man can "rile" me by any criticism of America, its ideals or its manners. Most of the adverse Most of the adverse criticism one hears of us is justified. We are rude and "pushy." Young, growing things are. We have no aristocracy of birth; our pretense at it is ludicrous. That we do not possess it is our greatest good fortune. We possess an aristocracy of accomplishment, to membership in which every American is born eligible. Every American may aspire to walk with kings. His limitless liberty of aspiration is his very finest heritage. I am not even sensitive as to the language we speak. The Scotch, Australians, and good folk from Saint Lucy's protest that it isn't English; the Englishman usually has less to say than they. It annoys them if we confess that it is not, and claim to "talk United States." Whatever we talk, it is a living, elastic medium, which develops new terms and sloughs them off, if they do not stand wear and tear of usage. It becomes us-for we are untrammeled by even a glorious past, expressed in families, castles and traditions which hang, not so much like beautiful ancient jewels, but like disastrous millstones, about the necks of other nations. We are all strident present and boundless future! Against a William the Conqueror we can set a Hill, a Harriman, a John D. Rockefeller any day-against a Warwick Castle, the Yosemite. And against the traditional law of entail-glory be!-the fact that a beggar may come to have and to hold a little kingdom anywhere within our territory until a better man appear to take it from him again!

The things for which at home we lose appreciation are, when one views one's country from abroad,

seen to be vital components of it: Freedom of thought and action, and Democracy-the equality of possibilities. Resident Americans who come tripping annoy us with talk of money-power, class, dirty politics, and declining interest in individual citizenship. Local ills and local pessimism! The generalizations are right! America is the land of Freedom-but one must get outside America to see clearly that it is so.

And no matter where we sojourn, we expatriates "belong," while we continue to "think American," in tune to the liberty and equality which is carrying America forward. "Thinking American" makes us see America as logical, comprehensible, sound, and full of measureless promise and infinite possibility.

On the other side of the world, an American, Charles H. Crooks, has charge of a hospital in the interior of Siam. His letter is a picture of cosmopolitan industry coöperating to carry civilization to a backward corner of the earth-but, after all, Siam is forward-looking enough to have joined the nations that are fighting Germany for the freedom of the world:

If in imagination the reader will go to a point slightly south of Mexico City and pass through the earth to his antipodal position, the destination will be in the vicinity of our place of business. Or if preference be for the ordinary routes of travel there is little difference in distance between the Atlantic and Pacific routes from New York to the Port of Bangkok, approximately thirteen thousand miles, thence northward into the tropical jungle four hundred miles; roughly 100° E. Long., 18° N. Lat.

A HOSPITAL IN SIAM

Our institution is located in the chief city of a province of two hundred and fifty thousand population and area larger than any of a number of the smaller states of the Union. It is the only institution in the entire province offering the advantages of modern medicine and surgery; in fact it offers the only opportunity for surgical treatment, the native practicians making no attempt in this line. We operate a hospital and two dispensaries and are the only source of supply for dependable drugs. In normal years some fifteen thousand persons receive treatment and in epidemic smallpox years we have vaccinated thirty thousand persons in addition to our regular clientele. Those in every grade of society receive treatment from the highest official down to the coolie; subjects of ten nations including European princes have received treatment in a single year. Malaria and bowel diseases produce the majority of the medical cases; and stone of the urinary bladder, a disease causing most excruciating suffering but very amenable to treatment, is the source of most of the surgical cases.

Nearly every disease prevalent in the Western Hemisphere exists here in addition to many peculiar to the Tropics. We have been conducting a hookworm campaign for some months.

We are also in charge of a similar institution operating a hospital and two dispensaries, touching perhaps one. third the number of people in a neighboring province. of population and area about one half our home province. To reach this Station we ride a motorcycle built in Massachusetts; a railway carriage built in France, pulled by a locomotive built in Germany and traveling over rails manufactured in Pennsylvania; and a motor-bus built in England. Most of our surgical instruments are made in London, and our quinine and other lines of tablets, stamped to our own order, are manufactured in Michigan, the bulk of our other supplies coming from Chicago and London.

I am also responsible for the operation of the only tannery in Siam using the Chrome chemical process. This manufacturing enterprise uses domestic hides and tanning compound made in New Jersey. The purpose of establishment is to demonstrate to the Government and people the possibilities in the development of local industries.

My wife edits the only periodical published in the Lao language, spoken by more than ten million people. The Buddhist Scriptures are their only written literature, and this periodical, printed on paper from Great Britain and with type cast in New York, is their only source of general information.

Farther south in the Antipodes, in New Zealand, an American woman, Miss Mary Bachelder, has heard rumblings of the World War that harmonize with the mutterings of Nature in Rotorua, where volcanoes and geysers have for generations waged war upon men who have ventured to live near them:

An American in far-away New Zealand, where the guns of war are never heard, could tell you but little of the "foreign fighting line," save only of the 60,000 soldiers who have gone thither, of the mothers who work and pray here, of the men who come back, maimed witnesses to the fact that even these tiny islands are bearing their part to-day. So my letter to you will not dwell on these things, others can tell of them far more vividly. Instead, may I write you of a true experience in Rotorua, safetyvalve of New Zealand as it is called, Rotorua, where the ground is soft and steaming beneath one's feet, land of geysers, hot lakes, and boiling mud pools? To me, at least, the incident of my visit there was both interesting and memorable. Imagine, then, that you were there, as I was, on a certain fateful night in May. Listen! hear that low, ominous rumbling in the distance as the goddess of the doomed region stirred uneasily in her sleep? Suddenly the surface of the earth

Did you

shook and heaved, and out of the darkness a tongue

of flame shot upward. of flame shot upward. From ugly, yawning cracks rocks and lava spurted, and columns of steam and water issued forth. Strange, weird sounds rent the air and above them all the piteous wail of a little child, for that night the goddess claimed three victims. Later, when all was quiet, fearful yet curious tourists passed by to look at the havoc wrought. And the newspapers reported the greatest eruption since the Pink Terraces were destroyed.

The wonders of Rotorua have a fascination for the sight-seer which danger has no power to quell. Always the traveler will go to see Sikitere, even after such an eruption as this, always there is employment for the guides at Whakarewarewa. But the greatest sights of all are to be found in the Wairaeki Valley which we next visited. There is a pool of boiling, bright blue water, of infinite depth at which the tourist gazes steadfastly, lured, fascinated by the bubble-bubble-bubble, everlasting bubble of its clear, deceitful waters. There is a narrow path which leads to a little bridge, over which a geyser plays intermittently, and the desire. to climb it as it winds upward on the other side drags the tourist across between its eruptions. And always the geyser plays at definite periods, and always the traveler relies blindly on the goddess who holds his life in the hollow of her hand. But some day I dared not think of that as I crossed the little bridge, but hurried on, staff in hand, to the Dragon's Mouth, a fearful, roaring geyser, also intermittent. And here, also, adventure bade me go forward, and I entered those forbidding `jaws, stared for a second down that black mouth, and fled. A second later and the spot where I had stood was covered with a whirlpool of boiling steam and water. Amidst all this, quite close to that pool of bubbling mud called the "Devil's Trumpet," is a strange contrast. From an immense height, drowning all other sound by their roaring, the Aratiatia Rapids fall and rush onward in a sheet of seething foam— a second Niagara. Among so many wonders, so many weird sights, they are for some the most wondrous sight of all.

Then, with the vision of geysers and boiling lakes before my eyes, with the "plop" of mud pools and the sound of the rapids in my ears, I

came home, back from the enchanted land, beneath whose smiling exterior the goddess lies, watchful, merciless, awe-inspiring, with the weapons of death in her hand. But I have seen a valley laid waste by her power, I have seen the beauties of the legend-country. Was it not an experience?

Lee L. Johnson's letter, from Pernambuco, Brazil, paints a picture of tropical life and people that may be useful by its suggestion of Latin-American qualities which we should understand if we are to make our country popular south of the Rio Grande:

As this city lies only some eight degrees south of the equator, the climate is sufficiently warm to dispense with the necessity of all clothing not demanded by conventionality. This latter word seems to be missing from the vocabulary of many Brazilians, for it is common to see a half dozen urchins, six or eight years of age, clad only in Nature's costume, playing in the street. The poorer people go barefoot the year round. Thousands never owned a pair of shoes, and others use these man-made encumbrances only on feast days and Sundays.

The residences are usually built, joined one to another, to open directly on the street. The most common diversion of the ladies is to sit in the open window and gaze at the passers-by.

GAY LIFE IN PERNAMBUCO

The customs as to courtship and marriage seem very strange to "Yankees," as all North Americans are called. Passing along the street, one frequently sees a victim of Cupid standing on the sidewalk conversing, maybe for hours, with his lady love who sits in the open window. All the world knows that the lover has not yet won "the promise true," for when that important event occurs, the door will be opened to the "noivo" and henceforth the courting will be in the parlor. It is said that the mother-in-law always receives the first kiss. The engagement is always announced at once, and to break an engagement is considered almost an unpardonable sin. In this, it seems to me, the United States might profitably take some lessons from Brazil.

The most of the transportation is done on the heads of "corregadores" as the carriers are called. An American lady, recently arrived, was greatly interested, a few days ago, in seeing our piano moved on the heads of six men as they chanted their peculiar song to keep the step.

NO MIDDLE CLASS IN BRAZIL

Brazilians may be classified in two great divisions: the educational, wealthy class, representing, perhaps, ten or fifteen per cent. of the people, which governs the country, directing all its affairs, religious, social and financial; and the other class composed of the ignorant laboring people. There is no great intelligent middle class, as we have in the United States.

Brazil has an area almost equal to that of the United States, and is endowed with rich deposits of gold, silver, and other minerals, largely unexplored, and with a soil unexcelled for productiveness. But her methods of agriculture are fifty years behind compared with the United States. The cultivation is almost exclusively by the hoe. In traveling somewhat extensively in a number of states of North Brazil, I have seen only two plows at work. I know of no more inviting field in all

the world for the investment of American dollars or American lives.

There are letters from the front somewhere in France, but here are some extracts from Switzerland, on the other side of the fighting line. Mr. George D. Herron, writing from Geneva, says:

What appeals to me is the valor and worth of the peace which a little nation has maintained in the midst of the warring world. I have been for several months in the midst of this little nation, toiling there, with many other foreigners, at one of the teeming cross-ways of Europe. It is to Switzerland I refer, of course. There are those of us who have been her guests at a time when her people are under an increasing economic stress and uncertainty; and her guests we still are. We are also under her protection. Her attitude toward us, amidst the menacing complications that beset her on every hand, has been one of forbearing and chivalrous hospitality. Even when expressing opinions that were perilous to her neutrality-so vitally necessary to the world as well as to herself-we have had the benefit of her political benevolence, her intellectual tolerance.

We have also witnessed the greatness of soul with which this little republic has borne the burden of the world's woe. We have seen her giving home and healing, giving every kind of moral and material succor, to all the contending nations. She has done this at enormous expense and inconvenience to herself, involving a sacrifice as yet unreckonable. She has poured out her treasure from every valley, from every mountain village. She has made her land an oasis of mercy in a world from which many of the ancient mercies seem to have departed. And, in order to keep her armed sons upon her frontier, protecting the strangers within her gates as well as herself, she has had to suspend many of her industries and modes of economic sustenance.

And now Switzerland is immeasurably imperiled by an agitation finding voice in the press and even in Congress to prohibit all shipments to her borders. If such a step is taken, in six months the Swiss people will be in a position of greatest economic doubt and difficulty, and even menaced with the probability of starvation. Switzerland is amazed and appalled by this campaign, and grieved at the misrepresentation upon which it is based. Her people cannot believe that America will refuse her the necessities of life. Switzerland trusts America; and does not believe-not for a moment-that America will betray that trust.

In preserving Switzerland, America will be preserving the rudimentary form of the new political earth-the earth upon which a new and more intimate heaven shall open new and common doors of communion with mankind.

EVERAL of the largest American shipyards are devoting all their energies at present to the production of destroyers. England is exerting all its energies to turning out this type of ship on an unprecedented scale. Both nations have practically abandoned construction work on other kinds of war vessels and are concentrating on destroyers. England and the United States probably together have not far from eighty or ninety dreadnaughts and an enormous number of cruisers and other standard types. Thus there is little chance that the German Navy can ever make a successful or even a moderately successful stand. But both England and the United States need new destroyers by the hundreds, perhaps thousands.

The new destroyers will emphasize all the features that have made them so indispensable in fighting submarines. Up to the present time 30 knots has represented the limit of speed. The new vessels will make

35; that is, they will make about 41 miles an hour-a speed almost as great as the average railroad train. As the submarine makes only about 15 knots on the surface, it will stand little chance if one of these new vessels appears on the horizon. Not only do the destroyers have this terrific speed, but the speed is under almost perfect control. The ships can turn at an exceedingly acute angle and can be brought to a stop almost as quickly as an automobile. They can thus dash forward, make circles, back, turn corners-they cut capers on the surface with the same ease as an expert skater on the ice. On the other hand the submarine on the surface is one of the clumsiest crafts in the world. These new destroyers, instead of the three- and four-inch guns popular in the old days, will carry fiveand six-inch guns. The new German submarines have a stronger armament than in the old days-hence this increased shooting power of destroyers. The builders are also