More Truth Than Poetry

CHAPTERS XXI-XXIX

By HANS ZINSSER

IN the first installment of his biography of his alter ego, R. S., Dr. Zinsser described his German parents and his early experiences. At Columbia he fell under the spell of poetry and philosophy, and of biology as defined by Edmund B. Wilson and Bashford Dean. Graduating from the laboratory, he went out to the Western plains, where he had his initial experience of anthropology.

Then came study in Paris, and afterwards return to Manhattan to plunge into hospital training. We read of his career as an ardent young interne, ranging through the city with the ambulance. The pages are peppered with anecdotes of the poor, of the old New York slums, and of the great doctors he served under.

As a German-American, R. S. was growing restive, and he felt in the winter of 1914-1915 that Germany, defeated, might be grafted with the republicanism his people had come to America to find. With this conviction he joined the Red Cross Typhus Commission for Serbia and plunged straightway into pursuit of the disease, managing as usual to chalk up adventures as experience. The Commission isolated the spotted-fever virus and mixed in the whirlpool of the Eastern war. Shocking years of the 1920’s drew him to serve and distrust the new Russian government, laboring against cholera and living with universal fear instead of suffrage. Rightly enough, the March installment concluded gayly with a bow in favor of Boston. The biography goes on to treat of Mexico, Hart Crane, the Orient, and new faces.

MORE TRUTH THAN POETRY

BY HANS ZINSSER

XXI

WITH the usual digressions, R. S. describes his work in Tunis with his friend, the great scholar Nicolle: —

How fervently I have often wished that my parents had been pious Christians and that, in the plastic years of childhood, before I had learned to think, my mind had been moulded in the comfortable belief in a life after death! How pleasant it must be to look placidly forward to rejoining, in heavenly surroundings of one’s own imaginative preference, those who have made our lives on earth richer and happier! The thought of death would be considerably mitigated for me by the expectation of seeing again — among others — Charles Nicolle, and renewing for a piece of eternity those summer evenings at Sidi-bu-Saïd where, as the cooling breeze came up from the sea, we walked together chatting of relapsing fever, trachoma, dysentery, brucellosis, Carthaginian archælogy, Roman mosaics, mediæval legends, French Encyclopædists, and many other things dear to our hearts.

And heaven might do worse than appear like Sidi-bu-Saïd, with the evening sun golden on the quiet waters of the Gulf of Bizerte and a cloudless sky darkening over the high shore where Carthage once stood. And if, together, we could have a small celestial laboratory and discover a few avian diseases like psittacosis, roup, or fowl pox among the angels, paradise were paradise indeed. Except for the infected angels, we had all these things, more or less, in Tunis for a little while.

I went to Tunis entirely on Nicolle’s account. For years we had been in correspondence. In 1915, we had a rendezvous for work together in the Balkans, but the French Government needed him at that time and our meeting was postponed. Already, even then, he was beginning to stand out as one of the great living bacteriologists — with no contemporary peers, in my judgment, except Bordet, Landsteiner, and Theobald Smith. The World War and the intervening period of concentration on theoretical problems had, for ten years, carried me away from the fields of work in which he had gained distinction. But in 1928, again returning to problems of typhus fever, I wanted to see him. Differences of opinion had arisen, new methods had been devised, and correspondence was unsatisfactory.

It was the beginning of a friendship that started in our heads and soon extended to our hearts. North Africa is an Eldorado for the student of infectious diseases. There are Malta fever, fièvre boutonneuse, relapsing fever, typhus, kala azar, leprosy, malaria, and odds and ends of tropical infection that come up from the oases in the south. There were many things to learn and much to discuss, and I was especially interested in trying to overcome some experimental difficulties by transmitting typhus to monkeys with lice from human beings. Nicolle received me with open arms. He gave me a laboratory, a technician, and all the materials I needed — even to a supply of bearded Arabs, who furnished the insects. Best of all, he gave me his friendship.

Nicolle was one of those men who achieve their successes by long preliminary thought, before an experiment is formulated, rather than by the frantic and often ill-conceived experimental activities that keep lesser men in ant-like agitation.

Indeed, I have often thought of ants in observing the quantity output of ‘what-of-it’ literature from many laboratories. I once watched a swarm of ants, on a lazy summer afternoon, and wondered why they had acquired the reputation for sagacity attributed to them by sentimental entomologists. One ant, I observed, was carrying a weighty bit of straw from one place to another, obviously making heavy weather of it. Instead of going around grass blades and sticks, he laboriously climbed over the tops of them, then painfully fell off and trudged onward — passing on the way, and even finding at his destination, bits of straw quite equal in beauty, size, and conformation to the one he had packed so strenuously over obstacles. My impression was that this ant was making a fool of himself. Yet there are bacteriologists and, for that matter, many people in other callings just like my ant.

Nicolle did relatively few and simple experiments. But every time he did one it was the result of long hours of intellectual incubation during which all possible variants had been considered and were allowed for in the final tests. Then he went straight to the point, without wasted motion. That was the method of Pasteur, as it was of Bordet, Theobald Smith, Jacques Loeb, and Landsteiner, whose simple, conclusive experiments are a joy to those able to appreciate them. For there is an ‘art’ of experimentation which is as elusive of definition as the art of color, sound, or letters. Indeed, there is a Pegasus for science as there is for the arts; and he, like his mate, spreads his wings only when he feels on his flanks the thighs of one whom the gods have appointed to ride him.

In the case of the louse discovery, Nicolle had carried out no more than a half-dozen crucial experiments after years of observation of the disease and its epidemiology. In this instance, the experiments were easily confirmed. In some other matters his reputation was rather damaged than otherwise by this habit of doing just enough work to convince himself and not carrying through far enough to convince others. He was one of the first, if not the first, to assert — on the basis of a meagre experimental material — that epidemic influenza was a virus disease, and it was so described in French textbooks some ten years before the cultivation of the virus proved him right. Like other superb experimenters — Pasteur among them — he was always precise in his observations, but less interested in the theories based upon them. Practically all the work he did was of an intensely practical nature, suggested by the problems he encountered in the field and at the bedside. Next to his typhus discoveries, his greatest service was the determination of infections inapparentes, the fact that animals may contract many diseases and transmit them without showing any — or only very slight — symptoms.

Apart from his scientific distinction, however, Nicolle was of the stuff of which the French Encyclopædists were made. I have seen his cultural scope approached only by a few Frenchmen and an occasional German of the old school — a type of learning that cannot be acquired by study alone, but represents the ripening of gifted minds that are attracted by everything about them worthy of interest.

Nicolle was novelist, philosopher, and historian. His day began at five in the morning, when he sat down to write until seven-thirty. These were the hours that produced his essays and his prize novel. Then a frugal breakfast, and he and his associates worked in the laboratory until eleven. The heat then sent us to our rooms until three, a period of the day when the entire town of Tunis went to sleep; even the camels lay in the shade of the hedges, and the wandering bands of Arabs rested near the wells, sleepily scratching themselves. Although, as far as the camels were concerned, the above is not strictly accurate. They are strange and, to a horseman, mysterious beasts. I have seen some of them in the suffocating heat of an African summer noon lie in the sun, not ten feet from the shade of a green hedge, eating a dry stick of wood with all signs of sybaritic enjoyment.

After three, we all worked again until seven, and in the evening we wandered out to Sidi-bu-Saïd or Carthage for dinner near the shore, with good food, passable Tunisian wine, and amiable conversation.

Those evenings linger in my mind as among the most happily peaceful I have spent. Either Nicolle chose his men with unusual sagacity, or it just happened that he attracted kindred spirits. Burnet, now his successor, distinguished for studies on leprosy and Malta fever, was the author of a highly intelligent book of literary criticism. The entomologist was a poet; and one of the assistants a classicist who in his leisure hours was studying Roman archæology. The conversation covered wide ranges from French literature to Arab architecture and Roman art.

It is this wide scope of cultural interests in many people quite as competent as our own in their special fields which started me thinking about the superiority of the French and the former German secondary education over our own. I have met men, old and young, of these nations all over the world, and have often been impressed by the fact that, unlike most of our compatriots of high specialistic learning, they showed signs of a richly cultivated intellectual subsoil. At the officers’ mess on a French auxiliary steamship, I once took part in a conversation which started with Diderot and Lamartine and then, through Bergson, passed on to William James, the second engineer and the purser locking horns on Science versus Metaphysics. A discussion of this kind would be unthinkable under similar circumstances among American or English sea dogs, perhaps for the good of our naval services. However that may be, as conditions are now, I believe it is wise for an American specialist to conceal his extraneous interests until eventually they die of inanition, lest he be regarded as eccentric and incompetent.

Subsequently I saw Nicolle almost every year. We spent hours with his friend Père Delattre, head of the White Fathers and most learned on Carthaginian excavation. This old gentleman and his order again aroused in me that deep admiration for certain activities of the Catholic Church to which I have been so often reluctantly constrained in spite of my utter lack of philosophical sympathy with its tenets. The White Fathers, so-called from the Arab burnous which is their costume, are trained in the Carthage monastery and then sent to Equatoria, whence only a fraction of them ever return. Like their colleagues of the various orders I later met in China, they are keenly alive to medical problems and carry physical as well as spiritual comfort to the interior. Delattre himself was an urbane, learned, and kindly gentleman whose friendship alone was worth the journey.

In subsequent years Nicolle and I explored the historical corners of Paris and of Rouen together, and when separated we wrote to each other once every month. In Rouen he showed me the house of Corneille and the residence of Flaubert’s father, surgeon to the HoôtelDieu. We saw the old Abbey where part of Manon Lescaut was written, and the garden pavilion on the Seine where Madame Bovary was created, a page or so a day. He introduced me to an old man who had known the Bovary’s first husband, the apothecary, the one whose feet were always cold in bed; and to another who had had a speaking acquaintance with Boule de Suif; for it appears that, to the town’s consternation, both Flaubert and de Maupassant took many of their characters from their neighbors in Rouen. There was another friend who had spent his lifetime determining precisely where Jeanne d’Arc was burned — about ten metres away from where it was supposed to have been. For this correction he has his bust of bronze in the public square.

I was with Nicolle and his family for a week at Nice a short time before he died. With him died one of the last great figures of the French school that took off from Pasteur, Roux, Chamberland, and Metchnikoff. Bordet is the only survivor of this breed of giants. For me, Nicolle’s death was the end of something that I knew was irrecoverable. It was of the same order of sorrow as had been the death of my father.

Flaubert once came to Tunis for local color when he was writing Salammbô. As a result, he put American cactus hedges into ancient Carthage. As a matter of fact, these were not brought to North Africa until the time of Maximilian’s adventure in Mexico. Now the cactus borders all the roads, and the wandering Bedouins live on the cactus pears when they can’t get anything else.

These roaming bands aroused my curiosity to penetrate south, for North Africa soon casts a spell over one that grips the imagination. But don’t be afraid that I am going Robert Hichens on you! There were no romantic adventures, except that I spent a few bibulous evenings with a young Russian engineer and his two lady friends, exploring the walled Arab quarters and, with them, being received in the home of a wealthy Arabian date planter. But Arab houses have been described ad nauseam. I did not get into any harems. The Russian, one of the poor expatriated upper class, glad to escape with their lives and to find frugal livings in the four corners of the world, was employed in a phosphate mine between the southern oases of Gabes and Tozeur.

It has been a mystery to me, in my wanderings after the World War, why there has been so relatively little feeling for the exiled White Russians. There has been a laudable and entirely justified sympathy for Jewish expatriates, Spanish communists, and for the Chinese, with organized relief and humane propaganda. But of all the unfortunate exiles whom the dreadful brutalities of the modern world have victimized, I have seen none more miserable or, on the whole, more appealing than these abandoned Russians. I have run into them in all corners of the world, — in Africa, in France, in China, Manchuria, and Japan, — utterly demoralized by suffering, only a few capable by intelligence and training of remaking their lives on the old standards. My young Russian engineer was one of these. He invited me to visit him, and I traveled along the coast through Sousse and Sfax, the Hadrumetum and Taparura of Roman founding, later strongholds of the piratical lords of the Mediterranean.

Wherever I went, I was impressed with the wisdom of French colonial policy. In every town, the old walled Arab quarters were surrounded by developing French settlements — the Arabs living and doing business as they pleased, the French establishing schools, developing agriculture, and in no way dispossessing the native populations. Many young Arabs go to French schools, learn the language, and, absorbing French customs, become Frenchmen. With the older ones, customs and religion limit social intercourse. But there is none of the White God attitude of the British, or the concentration on business with which Americans go among foreign populations. The native Jews were referred to as ‘Israelites,’ and that alone gives them a dignity that they rarely enjoy among other nations.

It appeared to me that the French gave the natives in their colonies a sense of being an important part of the empire and not a mere helotry. In the oases, the fertile, cultivable land was left to the Arabs, who were — at Tozeur at least — the rich proprietors. At Gabes, on the coast, there was a strong garrison of Spahis and native infantry, for it is on t he border of the Italian possessions, and even then Mussolini was casting covetous eyes on Tunisia. The Russian and I went swimming at Gabes in a surf warmer than our bodies, rolling across white sand. With us at the time, bathing by military order, were a company of coalblack native troops driving camels and donkeys into the waves ahead of them. I rode a borrowed camel and got seasick.

At Gabes I met the leader of a caravan that had come in from the south. He was a fine-looking old cutthroat — tall, bearded, and dignified, swathed in cloth which seemed to me far too hot for the climate. They told me it kept out the sand and the ‘heat.’ It did not keep in the smell. Yet in spite of all these superficial differences I was again reminded of the essential brotherhood of man by the fact that this fine old fellow was the spit and image of a distinguished professor of pathology in Boston, except that his aroma was not one of formalin and xylol. He spoke some French, and we talked horses. He showed me some of his, and almost dared me to ride a fascinating little white barbe, because I had ‘talked big’ — as I often do when it comes to horseflesh. The little thing — it was only about fifteen hands — promptly ran away with me, out of the oasis into the desert, heading in the general direction of the French Sudan. When I got almost out of sight of the palm trees, I managed to turn him around and steer him where the sand was softest, and finally he got tired. We came back to the camel enclosure at a walk.

The old man wanted to give me the horse for a thousand francs. But what I wanted to bring home was a camel — only the American consul stopped that, when I suggested it, because of a camel disease which was under quarantine. How I should have enjoyed showing up in full regalia at the Groton Hunt on a camel!

I should like to have seen more of my new friend, but I had to get back to Tunis to finish my work, via Kairawan, the sacred city where the ‘mosque of a thousand pillars’ is built with marble columns stolen from the Roman villas on the site of Carthage. On the way, I passed through El Djem, where the stone coliseum surrounded by desert, easily large enough to hold two or three thousand people, is impressive of the enterprise of Roman penetration and suggests that Roman Africa must have been fertile enough to nourish much larger populations than it can accommodate today. Much might be written about Roman Africa, where, under the vigilant valor of the Third Legion, a civilization was developed that gave Rome great soldiers, administrators, and scholars—among them Fronton, the rhetorician and tutor of Marcus Aurelius. This knowledge induced me to buy in a Tunis bookshop and reread the great Emperor’s Meditations, which had deeply impressed me in my youth. This time, though he still impressed me, he also gave me the feeling that he must have been a terrible prig.

The thought which puzzled me, after seeing these monuments of past glory and realizing that Rome and the Vandals had been displaced by a vigorous Arab civilization, was the suddenness with which Mohammedan culture had been arrested after the twelfth century. For several hundred years these conquerors had represented the flower of human thought in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and even in tolerance. Yet suddenly it all stopped.

This remains a problem for the historian. Nicolle thought the answer was polygamy. ‘How can a man with four wives do any constructive thinking?' It is not as simple as this, and remains a mystery, especially since the Moslems under Mansur, in the eighth century, were familiar by translations with Aristotle, Euclid, Plato, and Hippocrates, long before Greek thought had been rediscovered in Europe. They just didn’t go on to a Renaissance. It is one of those problems that make endless opportunity for pleasant discussion, but it is just as insoluble as that of the origin of syphilis.

I flew back across the Mediterranean, stopping at Ajaccio for gas. It was like a ride on the magic carpet. At eight in the morning, in an African city — camels, Arabs, and the Atlas Mountains on the horizon. At seven in the evening, in a dinner jacket in the restaurant of a gay hotel at Antibes.

XXII

In 1931, R. S. caught rats in Mexico, and was in turn captivated by Mexico’s charm.

The life of a student of any science is a constant series of frustrations. From his own observations and those of others, a trellis of theory is built up beyond the solid stakes of fact. The investigator constructs scaffoldings of experiment which break down again and again, and are as often reconstructed with the weak points reënforced. Eventually, as soon as he has tied down an elusive shoot, he loses interest and is lured by the ones a little higher up. There is never an end, and never a complete satisfaction — as there may be in the arts, when a perfect sonnet or a good statue is in itself final, and forever.

The scientist’s temporary relief from constant dissatisfaction with his own accomplishment comes with those interludes in which he projects his technical and theoretical training into a problem of practical application. R. S. consciously used his opportunities for field work and hospital consultation for such purposes of intellectual consolation and reinvigoration. His work in Serbia, in Russia, and in the army had, moreover, given him a taste of periodical excursions into the practical. Possibly if he had concentrated his interests within narrower fields, he would have approached more closely to his own conception of the true scientist. But he was temperamentally so constructed that he could not help trying to run a three-ringed circus. He usually had two or three theoretical problems on his hands, was engaged — such was his nature — in a series of acrimonious controversies, was lecturing to students, directing assistants, and scribbling sonnets on the backs of envelopes and unpaid bills, besides eternally revising his books. When he suddenly ran away to some remote region on what he called a ‘job,’ I knew that it was as much a question of necessary release as of purely scientific purpose.

The Mexican journey was largely the result of correspondence between him and his friend Mooser, who had sent him a strain of typhus with which he and his assistants, Batchclder and Castaneda, had done much preliminary work, disproving the filtrability of the virus, confirming the causative rôle of the little rods that Mooser had seen in guinea-pig infections, correlating these with the European Rickettsia bodies, passing them through lice, etc., etc. When Maxcy’s observations — of which he tells below — came to his notice, R. S. felt that proof of the Maxcy hypothesis could be brought only during an epidemic in a large city. Besides, he wanted to go to Mexico.

As usual, he had to get up steam by indulging in a little rambling: —

It is an erroneous impression, fostered by sensational popular biography, that scientific discovery is often made by inspiration — a sort of coup de foudre — from on high. This is rarely the case. Even Archimedes’ sudden inspiration in the bathtub; Newton’s experience in the apple orchard; Descartes’s geometrical discoveries in his bed; Darwin’s flash of lucidity on reading a passage in Malthus; Kekulé’s vision of the closed carbon ring which came to him on top of a London bus; and Einstein’s brilliant solution, in the patent office in Berne, of the Michelson puzzle, were not messages out of the blue. They were the final coördinations, by minds of genius, of innumerable accumulated facts and impressions which lesser men could grasp only in their uncorrelated isolation, but which — by them — were seen in entirety and integrated into general principles.

The scientist takes off from the manifold observations of predecessors, and shows his intelligence, if any, by his ability to discriminate between the important and the negligible, by selecting here and there the significant steppingstones that will lead across the difficulties to new understanding. The one who places the last stone and steps across to the terra firma of accomplished discovery reaps all the credit. Only the initiated know and honor those whose patient integrity and devotion to exact observation have made the last step possible.

All this is apropos of why I went to Mexico.

The louse transmission of typhus fever had been proved by my friend and preceptor, the late Charles Nicolle, that great and versatile scholar who won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in the same year in which he was awarded the Prix d’Osiris for his philosophical phantasy ‘Marmousse et Ses Hôtes.’ It was generally accepted, after this, that the bite of an infected louse was the only manner in which typhus could be acquired by man. In 1926, however, a young surgeon in the United States Public Health Service, Kenneth Maxcy, studied the sporadic cases of typhus fever which, for a good many years, had been occurring throughout the Southeastern United States. Maxcy, a careful and unhurried observer, approached his problem without preconception and with complete objectivity. After a detailed investigation of the distribution of such cases, their seasonal and local occurrence, and the circumstances surrounding a large number of individual infections, he concluded that this Southeastern American disease was not, in these instances, louse-transmitted. He suggested some other insect vector, and the possibility of a virus reservoir in animals associated with man — possibly rats, or mice.

His logic was as precise as his epidemiological survey, and constituted the basis from which his fellow officer Dyer, and my colleagues and I, were able eventually to establish the truth of both conjectures — namely, that this variety of typhus has its interepidemic reservoir in domestic rats, is kept going among these animals, and is occasionally transmitted to man by rat fleas. I mention these technical details, however, only to establish the reasons why I went to Mexico in 1931.

The disease which Maxcy studied is in every respect identical with the typhus fever which occurs with regular periodicity in the highlands of Mexico City. There my friend, the irascible, courageous, and devoted Herman Mooser, had long studied it, and from there had sent me not only material and information, but — best of all — his greatest gift to me, my faithful collaborator, Maximiliano Ruiz Castaneda. When Maxcy’s papers came out, we were engaged together in a number of other jobs that had to be finished before we could turn to the rat question. But finally, in 1931, we were free of preliminaries, and when Mooser telegraphed in late March that an epidemic, probably starting from the old Belèm Prison, was going on, and offered laboratory space, I took passage on the old Ward liner Orizaba for the faithful Ruiz and myself.

In order to do the work projected for Mexico, it was necessary for us to take with us a strain of the typhus virus with which we had been working, the peculiarities of which were thoroughly familiar to us. We wanted this strain to compare with any similar ones we could pick up in Mexican rats. At that time, though we have improved all this now, the only known method by which a typhus virus could be maintained was by continual animal passage, either in rats or in guinea pigs. In consequence, it was necessary to take with us five or six infected rats and a similar number of normal ones, so that we could make transfers from rat to rat en route.

It was essential that our infected animals should not be inoculated until the very last moment, in order that they might last without transfer at least until we arrived at Vera Cruz. For this reason three rats were inoculated in our laboratory in Boston on the day before departure for New York, and another set were inoculated on the sink of a friendly doctor’s office in New York about an hour before the ship sailed.

On the night before leaving New York, I went to a literary cocktail party of the type in vogue among the younger æsthetes in New York at that time, at which the cocktails were composed of 50 per cent alcohol, with glycerine and a little flavoring of orange juice. At this party I met a short, stocky, and powerfully built young man, with a friendly, heavy face under a ferocious pompadour, who was slightly tight when I arrived and who impressed me, in spite of his uncouth appearance, by his excellent choice of English. As usual at such parties, I did not catch his name, but on the following morning I saw him again on the ship, and found that it was Hart Crane.

Hart Crane’s tragic career has been described with rare understanding and gentleness by Borden. At the time that I met him, he was on his way to Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship, in order to saturate himself in the Mexican atmosphere while writing an epic poem on the Conquest, planned along lines which Archibald MacLeish somewhat later carried to such splendid fulfillment. Crane attached himself to Castaneda, to whom he took a strong liking; and in his poetic imagination — largely and incessantly stimulated by beer and highballs — the work in which Castaneda was engaged assumed heroic and fantastic proportions.

Crane had much charm. When — obviously drunk — he walked along the deck with a glass in one hand, a bottle of beer in the other, and smilingly addressed other passengers, he gave no offense. He was rarely entirely sober, but even so his conversation was not only reasonable, but often impressively intelligent; and his literary discrimination and generous taste did not seem to suffer under his alcoholism. The books he had with him consisted almost entirely of critical essays and collections of poetry. He seemed to read immensely, and, essentially self-educated, he had a breadth of literary information that was extraordinary. He spent a great deal of time in Castaneda’s cabin, solemnly contemplating the rats, which held a terrifying fascination for him.

Unfortunately, he had parted with most of his first quarterly Fellowship installment before he left New York, dining his friends, and long before we approached Havana he was in danger of running dry. By that time we had developed a sympathetic friendship for him, since he was a generous, warmhearted person, obviously drinking hard because of intense unhappiness. His unhappiness took root in certain freely acknowledged abnormalities against which he seemed to have ceased struggling and which had made life in the United States intolerable.

In Havana there was a famous café — the Diane — where the meals were excellent and the wine was more so. We tied up to the wharf around five o’clock in the afternoon, and the three of us, after driving about the city for an hour, went to the Diane for supper. We ate and drank well, Hart Crane doing nobly with an extra bottle of Chablis. After supper he borrowed some money with which he bought a couple of quarts of Bacardi. We were back on board at about nine-thirty in the evening. Crane retired to his cabin with the Bacardi, and Castaneda and I went to take a look at our rats. The infected animals had been worrying us because during the last day or two they had appeared listless and had developed diarrhæa, and three of them were near collapse. We were afraid that these had developed a paratyphoid infection and that the remaining animals might suffer similarly and die before we arrived at Vera Cruz, where we expected to be able to transfer virus.

Two of our rats were lying on their sides, hardly breathing and obviously in their last moments. We decided to throw them overboard and clean out the cages so that we might have some reasonable chance of keeping the others alive. We wrapped the sick ones in paper and carried them to the top deck, hoping that no one would see us. The presence of the rats on board was of course unknown to anyone except ourselves, Hart Crane, and the well-bribed room steward.

The ship was tied up to the wharf, and freight handling was still going on. Lighters were alongside with strong searchlights playing on them. Nevertheless, we threw the rats in, landing them in the sea between two barges, but — unfortunately — directly in a strong streak of light. Contact with the cold water revived the animals and we could see them as white streaks swimming hard against the current, trying to get to one of the outboard ropes that were holding a lighter. It was an anxious moment, because the rats were typhus-infected and, although dangerous consequences were remote, we did not think with easy minds of the possibility of introducing infected animals into the hold of a harbor craft. However, the current won, and to our great relief the weakening animals were carried into the harbor and passed out of sight.

While we were concentrated on this spectacle, rather more anxious than the circumstances warranted, Hart Crane had left his cabin and we found him standing beside us, gazing into the water with horrified eyes — seeing the rats, indeed, long after they had actually disappeared.

A year or two earlier, in Paris, Crane had had some trouble in a café, had been arrested and held for a night in an arrondissement police station. In the French jail he claimed he had seen a rat which he described as large and hairy and as big as a poodle. In that case the rat was magnified by Pernod, as in this case by Bacardi. The Paris animal started a complex, and now, considerably excited, Crane saw rats in every silvery wave that, in the glare of the searchlight, lapped against the sides of the lighter. He began to recite in his deep, loud voice, as though he were scanning lines from his Bridge poem: —

We tried to pull him away, but he was a powerful person, and while we were struggling we heard steps approaching and saw gold lace on a cap; whereupon both Castaneda and I thought it wise to disappear behind a lifeboat. The approaching person was, fortunately, the stolid Scandinavian First Officer, Mr. Jensen. We listened to the following conversation: —

CRANE. ‘The Doctor has thrown rats into the harbor of Havana. One rat is as big as a poodle.’

JENSEN. ‘What’s this about rats? You’re soused, man.’

CRANE. ‘NO. Look, look! See that rat climbing up the side of the lighter! His eyes shine. He has typhus. The Doctor has thrown typhus rats into the harbor.’

JENSEN. ‘Come, come, man — get to bed ‘ — pulling at his arm.

Jensen, to our great relief, was taking it for granted that this was part of an alcoholic fantasy. But the situation became still more complicated. Out of the shadows stepped a dusky little officer in police uniform, the Cuban Port Officer. In very bad English he asked: —

‘What’s this about throwing rats into the harbor of Havana? Who’s talking about typhus?’

CRANE. ‘The Doctor lias thrown typhus rats into the harbor. See them swimming about? One is as big as a poodle.’

JENSEN. ‘Don’t mind him, Mister. He’s just one of them drunken Americans.’

Castaneda and I slid along the dark deck, found a gangway, and sat in my cabin uncomfortably waiting developments.

After another ten minutes, we heard a a group of struggling men clatter along the corridor, and Hart Crane’s booming voice: —

‘I’m telling the truth! There are rats all over the harbor, and the rats have typhus.’

Then we heard him shoved into his cabin, the slam of a door, and the turn of a key. We breathed more easily.

By morning, we were on our way. Crane came out of his cabin, walked the deck as usual with his bottle of beer, and ran slap into the Captain. The Captain was a Bluenose, of the fine-looking fisherman type, whose name — improbable as it may sound — was Blackadder. He had received a report from Officer Jensen and was roaming about with the intention of sizing up the alcoholic passenger. They met face to face, and the Captain engaged Crane in conversation. Fortunately, the rats had been completely forgotten for the moment, and Crane — who could be very charming in his sober intervals — chatted with the Captain about the excellence of the ship and how pleasant the voyage had been.

‘And what are you in private life, sir?’ asked the Captain.

Crane threw back his shoulders and proudly said: ‘I am a poet, sir!’

The Captain looked at Crane, shook his head, turned on his heel, and walked away.

I saw a lot of Crane in Mexico City and in a suburb where an American woman writer had given him a room. He used to drop into the Mansera Hotel when I was out and introduce himself to the barkeeper, who had orders to give him what he asked for. I had tried to cut down Crane’s alcohol, but it made him unhappy. The barkeeper always told me with pride: ‘Your friend the great poet was here and had three Bacardis.’

The Mexicans are often charming and childlike. Crane was arrested two or three times, but when the police discovered that he was a poet they kept him only long enough to make sure he could safely go home, and then released him. Crane had an appealing and lovable nature, and was unquestionably a man of great gifts which might have flowered into coherent beauty had he been more stable. On the way home, some months later, again on the Orizaba, he leaped into the sea one morning off the coast of Yucatan.

We arrived at Vera Cruz and were met at the boat by the local Mexican Health Officer, who arranged the admission of our animals to the Republic of Mexico, immediately took us to the little Public Health Laboratory, where we were able to transfer blood from the infected to the normal rats, and then conducted us about to show us the town.

XXIII

The Mexicans must be getting very tired of the gush of literature about them that has flowed from the pens of American travelers, artists, and correspondents during the last few years. They do not enjoy being patronized, nor do they like to be written about as though they were a sort of tragicomic theatrical anachronism on our continent. To understand them one must have intimate Mexican friends and develop a respect for a civilization that, utterly unlike our own, yet has values which, in our intensely commercial and practical development , have been neglected and may never be recaptured.

If they have no middle class, their greatest obstacle to the achievement of the national power to which their resources entitle them, it is largely because they have had an enormous Indian population to amalgamate into national solidarity; and if they seem to have exploited this Indian population in the past, they have not, at least, ruthlessly destroyed it. —as we have our own — and are making slow but definite progress in moulding their Indians into an agricultural, self-supporting population from which, eventually, will spring the middle class they require.

As a matter of fact, the Indian population is Mexico, and that is the main reason why we do not understand the Mexicans. Their developing civilization starts from a base line quite different from our Anglo-Saxon, fundamentally commercial one. They do not want to be exploited by our industrialists as they have seen these ‘empire builders’ exploit our own natural resources. They may be right or wrong about this, for all I know. But they are right in being afraid of us. They also think that we are extremely funny. There is quite a lore of Mexican witticisms about Americans.

There was a beggar in Cuernavaca who used to rob the old graveyard of skeletons and sell them as souvenirs to American tourists, saying: ‘This is the skeleton of the great deliverer, Juárez.’ He sold one of these for ten dollars to a gentleman from Chicago. The next day the same customer was still in town, but the beggar didn’t recognize him and again offered him a skeleton. This time, however, since he was running short of graves, the bones were those of a child.

‘But you sold me Juárez’s skeleton yesterday,’ said the American.

‘Oh, yes,’ replied the beggar, ‘but this is his skeleton when he was a baby. This you may also have for ten dollars.’

The American bargained him down to five dollars, and bought the baby.

Then there was the American diplomat who was in Mexico many years during the Díaz régime, and never learned Spanish. When he returned to the States he was asked whether the Mexicans were intelligent people. ‘Oh, soso,’ he replied. ‘You know, I was in Mexico fifteen years and the Mexicans didn’t learn English.’

The difference in the points of view of the two nations is illustrated by the experience of an American lady who saw, in a shop in Mexico City, a wicker chair which she thought had exceptionally beautiful lines. She asked the price, which was ten pesos. ’How much would you charge to make me a dozen like that?’ she asked. ‘Two hundred and fifty pesos,’ said the carpenter. ‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘Ten pesos for one and two hundred and fifty for twelve?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the Mexican. ‘It would bore me so much to make twelve, one just like the other.’

Yet Americans used to be more like that before the business disease struck us. Up in Vermont there are some left, like the old storekeeper in Morgan Center who said, when children wanted to buy picture postcards: ‘I don’t keep ‘em any longer. There was too much demand for them.’ There are a lot more who would like to be like this. But they are swept down the drains of competitive trade.

Purged of all scientific jargon, our work in Mexico consisted of mapping the typhus foci in the city, selecting houses in which cases were occurring, and then setting to work catching as many rats as possible; also collecting resident bedbugs. When the rats were trapped, they were carefully gone over for fleas and rat lice. The rat brains (where typhus virus would be found if the animals were infected) were injected into guinea pigs; likewise the well-ground bodies of bedbugs, fleas, and so forth. For this part of the work, my Mexican associate, Castaneda, and I were given space in the American Hospital (largely served by German and Swiss doctors) in the laboratory of Herman Mooser.

This lovable, kindhearted Swiss was, and is, one of the best scientific observers with whom it has ever been my good luck to work. Without him, we should probably have failed. He is a little, sturdy bombshell of energy whose brutal honesty has made him many enemies among all but equally honest people. He is now professor at the University of Zurich, every inch of his five feet four a man and a scientist — with a mind like a bell and the temper of a Gatling gun. It was worth the trip to Mexico to know him. His laboratory was on a part of the hospital lawn where, in a tent, one of our most brilliant American bacteriologists — Ricketts — died of typhus in 1910.

The rat catching would not have been possible without the coöperation of the Mexican Surgeon General, Dr. Raphael Silva. Silva was a type of the Mexican upper class which will probably disappear as an expensive sacrifice to socialism. Wealthy, highly cultivated and polished, almost a professional musician, a pupil of d’Albert, in his own name a composer of considerable accomplishment, Silva entertained me a whole evening in his palace playing his own compositions. At the same time, he was a good doctor and an administrator who developed as effective a health service as the conditions of the country permitted. He furnished us with traps, transportation, epidemic information, and a professional rat catcher.

Do not sneer at rat catchers unless you have tried to catch rats alive. Poisoning them is mere amateur stuff. And, besides, when you get dead rats all their precious vermin are lost, since these little creatures have the wisdom, as soon as their host grows cold, to leave him and seek other pastures. But to catch rats alive is an art, and our Gustavo was an artist. He knew rats—he looked like one. He understood their psychology, the routes they were likely to take, and the places where food would not look suspicious.

Now, when I first set my eyes on Gustavo, I did not expect much of him. He was about five feet high, dusky of face, distinctly Indio of type, dressed in blue overalls and a red shirt, a widebrimmed and very greasy hat perched jauntily on his thick mop of straight black hair. He looked dangerous, yet in spite of his dilapidated appearance there was that air of pride about him that characterizes the lowliest Mexican when confronted with a gringo.

‘Can he really catch rats?’ I asked, knowing that rat catching was not everybody’s business.

‘Can he catch rats!’ was the answer. ‘El hijo de un pez puede nadar. (The son of a fish can swim.) His father was the best rat catcher in Mexico. His grandfather before him. It is in the blood. Be reassured. Place your faith in Gustavo, and you will have rats as you wish, when you wish, and from where you wish — old rats, young rats, mothers and babies. Leave it to Gustavo.’

At this high praise, Gustavo drew himself up to his full one hundred and fiftytwo centimetres and stuck out his chest.

Gustavo knew that a rat’s most effective defense is his sense of smell. Now of course it did not require the acuteness of a rat’s nose to become aware of Gustavo. Even with a cold, I knew where he stood without looking about. But he made up for this by his technique. He never touched a trap with his hands. The cages were flamed between usings; they were handled, baited, and set with long forceps. They were put in just the right places. And so, thanks to Gustavo, rats began to come in with happy rapidity. The eighty-sixth rat from the Belèm Prison showed typhus. We established, together with Dyer’s flea experiments, the rat reservoir of Mexican typhus. We got the credit. It was Gustavo who deserved it.

The University of Mexico is the student’s paradise. Students have a voice in the University government. If a professor flunks too many pupils, out he goes on his ear. Not even the Deans are safe. It is as though Harvard were governed by the Editorial Board of the Lampoon. It may yet be so with us in a slightly different manner, if the young men from the teachers’ union succeed in their present propaganda. We might have a sort of educational New Deal, with learning appraised somewhat as Granville Hicks appraises literature—if it isn’t good, honest, revolutionary stuff, it’s not good art or science; and Petrarch, Keats, Goethe, and the like, couldn’t get to first base in our English departments.

I should like to have stayed longer in Mexico. In few places have I felt so happily comfortable as among these simple and essentially courteous and docile people. Also, they have a lot of fascinating diseases up in the back country. But there was work waiting for me at home, and the job for which I had come was done. I left with the feeling that this country will contribute immensely and correctively to our Northern civilization when we learn to approach its people without the arrogance and avarice that have characterized most of our past relations with them. Of course they have had a lot of revolutions. But these are due less to political ineptitude than to a national indigestion engendered by their greasy flapjacks, their chili sauce, and their pulque. Dyspepsia is the breeder of political discontent, and when it hits a whole nation it leads to riot. Give the Mexicans a good home diet, cheaper beer, and tons of soap and flea powder, and we shall have a great, tranquil, and friendly neighbor.

XXIV

R. S. turns to the political incompetence of professional people, and gives some reasons why he loves France: —

Plato says somewhere in his Protagoras that, even though a man be a good flute player, this is no reason to consider him an authority on politics. I may have garbled the phraseology, but the sense is that of Plato’s thought. But like so many platitudes set down by great philosophers, often quoted and too simple to be misunderstood, this one has had little or no influence on human action; and the world, still waiting for the disciplined and trained governing class recommended in the Republic, is being guided, as always, by what may be broadly referred to as ‘flute players.’ We have apparently again reached that phase in the cycle of political history at which, as Aristotle foretold and Polybius described, democracy—having developed ad absurdum — is destroying itself and is forcing the pendulum back into the swing of autocracy, ‘Fascism’ or ‘ Bolshevism.’ At any rate, as one of the French leading writers (Was it that clever Gallic Aryan, Jules Sauerwein? Or Léon Bailby of Le Jour?) said, ‘The time has come at which no citizen of any country can afford to remain indifferent.’ But what good does it do not. to remain indifferent?

I resented deeply not being allowed to remain indifferent, when it made no difference whatever whet her I was or was not; especially when this interference with my indifference distracted me from my concentration on those interests in which by nature and training I was alone capable of rendering some little service to my generation.

Accordingly I made up my mind, though I did not succeed, to remain indifferent, and I welcomed the chance to make a quick trip to Geneva to a League of Nations conference on epidemic control. And though I was reluctantly beginning to approve of much that our government was doing, I wanted to get away from all the New Deal business and the headlines about Messrs. Wallace and Ickes and Eccles, Madame Perkins, the CIO, the WPA, PWA, SEC, TVA, etc., etc. Also, I hadn’t voted for the whole Roosevelt family. I was sick of Sistie and Buzzie and Jimmie and Elliott and John, of ‘My Day,’ and of the everlasting smile on the Presidential countenance in every picture, however serious the issue or however disturbing the speech. I thought it would be nice to get away from politics, economics, and class consciousness. I would seek the quiet byroads where there were peasants and mountains, fields, streams, poulet rôti, soupe à l’oignon, and Pernod.

As I passed through Paris, it happened that a distinguished Belgian scientist I had long known and admired was giving lectures at the Pasteur Institute. Hearing that I was passing through, he invited me to dine with him at M. Cholot’s ‘Ane Rouge.’

There were twelve at table, four of them among the most distinguished scientists in France. The conversation, when it became serious, was largely political. Everyone there was Front Populaire and the opinions that were expressed were of a type which in America would be labeled ‘red.’ One of the men (there were two women present, one of them a physicist of high standing) was in Blum’s cabinet. Deceived by the tone of the conversation into believing that these people whom I so admired were convinced communists, I made a remark which indicated that I hoped France would be spared the fate of Russia. Right then and there I received an education in French psychology which should have been unnecessary.

‘You quite misunderstand,’ said the physicist. ‘What happened in Russia will never happen in France. We are not internationalists. We want social justice for France. We are and will remain a democracy, and the tricolor, not the red flag, will remain our emblem. We would oppose a dictatorship of the proletariat as vigorously as we are now opposed to a dictatorship of the financiers. But only liberalism toward labor and reform in our industrial and economic life can save for France the solidarity and the national pride which the Revolution gave her and the Commune consolidated as the French Republic.’

Frenchmen may quarrel among themselves, but conservative and radical together agree with Renan that ‘La France est charmante comme elle est.' A German, E. R. Curtius, who has performed a noble but so far futile task in attempting to explain the French to the German nation, knew long ago what I learned on that—to me — memorable evening on Montmartre. In his Essai sur la France (1932) he said: ‘Justice is not, for the French, a mere theoretical virtue; its power over the French spirit is considerable. ... It [sense of justice] is a reaction [of this people] with which politicians of all parties are familiar. . . . We have seen generals of the Third Republic. proclaim to their troops: “You will impose respect for justice because, more even than liberty, equality, and fraternity, it is the sentiment to which the French will adhere above all others.”’

France can be conservative and radical at the same time. Radicalism in France is as much an intellectual as a political movement, and is not, except in certain industrial centres, determined — as so largely with us — by economic condition. The past is strong in France, and in all classes there is the powerful influence of what Barrès has called ‘la terre et les morts.’ As Montégut said: ‘La vérité est que la France, pays des contradictions, est à la fois novatrice avec audace et conservatrice avec entêtement, révolutionnaire et traditionnelle, utopiste et routinière.' France may go far to the left in the sense of adjustment to the new social order. She will not do it as Russia did, with destruction of all the heritage of the great past. She has had her great revolution, but, violent as it was, the real France survived it.

It is a great pity that all those wise foreign correspondents who write our books about European conditions so rarely are competent to dive below the surface of the superficial political storms into the deep and powerful ground swells of national character and tradition. But even if some of the more able should succeed in doing this, the American people would probably not understand.

One warm and sunny day I accepted an invitation from a friend to visit a fishing club which meets in a region of étangs and river overflows not far from Paris. Fishing in France, it should be observed, is an occupation not in any way comparable to the same sport in Anglo-Saxon countries. When an American or an Englishman — especially an Englishman — speaks of going fishing, he is alluding to an upper-class accomplishment which necessitates a highly specialized and expensive equipment,— such as hip boots and cloth hats draped with half-concealed fish hooks, — involves a technical vernacular concerning pink hackles, green widows, and so forth, and an air of sportsmanly superiority not unlike that of those who play polo and ride to hounds. Fishing in France is quite another thing. It is a democratic occupation that requires only the simplest equipment, very little knowledge, not much water, and, in most cases, seems able even to dispense with the fish.

I once knew a man who had met someone who had seen a friend catch a fish in the Seine. I have taken this story on hearsay. But as far as my own experience over the course of a great many years is concerned, I have seen many thousands of French fishermen holding anywhere from one to four long bamboo poles over the waters of almost all the French rivers, — the Seine, the Marne, the Loire, the Doubs, the Oise, the Indre, and so forth, — over an incredible number of étangs, ponds, and even puddles; I have watched them for hours on end (one of the great charms of France has always been the fact that one can watch people do things or doing nothing for hours on end and not feel that one is losing time), and never have I seen any one of them catch a fish.

It is all very well for gentlemen like Izaak Walton, Bliss Perry, Stephen Leacock, and others to expound upon fishing as the occupation of philosophers. But when the Anglo-Saxon fishes, he takes the whole thing unphilosophically; he travels long distances, he climbs hills or ‘carries’ between lakes, he ‘whips’ streams and ‘plays’ fish, and whatever else is necessary; his fishing involves thought, aptitude, effort, and attention. Now it may well be that I have had bad luck, and that occasionally in the history of faire-ing la pêche in France a perch or a brocket has been actually caught. A great many Frenchmen have fished for many centuries. But even so, I assert that catching fish is not the primary purpose of fishing in France.

The French fisherman with a day off takes his wife and his one or two children, his mother and father, or his wife’s mother and father if they are living with him, a large basket of provisions,&emdash sausages, bread, brioches, and wine, — a little bait, and five or six long and cheap bamboo rods; and, either on foot, by bicycle, tramcar, omnibus, — rarely by motor, — he goes to the nearest body of water in which a fish might reasonably live. Going to such a body of water is about the only concession made to the ostensible purpose of fishing. On his arrival there, the hooks receive each a bit of worm or of yesterday’s veal or pork, and are dropped into the water with cork floats to hold them at the right depth. The rods are then fixed on shore, the children start a game of some kind, and their elders begin to converse with each other or with neighboring groups — for the chances are that there are similarly fishing households ten or fifteen yards away on either side. Or, again, if the fisherman is alone, when the rods are in place their owner will stretch out and go to sleep until it is time for lunch.

There are many ways of doing it, but the principle remains the same. The French fisherman is the real philosopher. He fishes because the quiet, the peaceful scenery, the soothing swish of the waters, rest mind and body and give him time to think about the destiny of France.

Leaving my friends to their poles and flat-bottomed boats, I walked along the banks of the Marne canal. I came upon a solitary fisherman.

‘What luck?' I asked.

He roused himself from a lethargic concentration on three corks bobbing on the muddy water, and ignored my question.

' Les anglais like to walk in the sun. Me, I like to sit in the shade.’

‘How about a little Calvados?’ I asked, pulling a flask out of my pocket.

This broke the ice. I gave him a sturdy dose in the metal screw-cap. I sat down and had one myself. He had another. I had another. We each had two more. I became interested in the corks.

‘Do you ever catch anything?’

‘Once in a while,’ he replied, ‘but it doesn’t matter. What is a fish or two? They aren’t very big anyway. It’s the calm. No wife, no children, no patrons, no politics. Here I am—alone in France.'

This gave me my cue.

‘What do you think of the state of affairs? Is France approaching an economic revolution?’

‘ Je m’en fiche,' he said. ‘Me, I am a mechanic. My friends work in factories and shops. We are making poor livings, but we live. Our children get educated —the schools are free. We have enough to eat. Our wives are working at one thing or another. Mine keeps an épicerie. Her father is a farmer. We get butter and eggs when he has them to spare. And if there are no fish in the Marne, it is still a restful pleasure to go fishing — nevertheless.’ He laughed. ‘Is there another little drop in your flask, monsieur? ‘

I stretched out on the slope beside him. Here was a kindred spirit. He ‘en-fiched’ himself. We might have become firm friends in the solidarity of convinced ‘en-fichism,’ but we both went to sleep, and when I woke up the sun was setting and he was gone.

XXV

I was back in Paris during the following winter, this time to take part in the teaching at the École de Médecine. It turned out to be one of the happiest experiences of my checkered career. I was among colleagues many of whom were old friends and acquaintances, and the French medical students were as responsive a lot of youngsters as it has ever been my good luck to teach displaying, incidentally, a great deal of courteous patience with my difficulties with the subjunctives and passés définis in my lectures. By courtesy of my friends of the Pasteur Institute, I was given a laboratory in that institution, so that my own work could be carried on without interruption. The genial and kindhearted Charles Martin, one of the few survivors of the old guard, was then Director.

Roux, the discoverer of diphtheria toxin, had died the year before-but fortunately I had had the good luck to know him for some years before his death. He was the last of that small group of Pasteur’s intimate disciples whose names are inscribed, with that of his teacher, on the permanent rolls of our profession. Small, frail, and shrunken with age, Roux remained until the very end keen, alert, and almost fanatically devoted to science. The Institute was his life and he expected from others the same exclusive concentration on the work which had governed his own existence. For years, and I suspect always, he had lived the life of a recluse, almost that of a saint — frugal, asking nothing of the world but to be loft undisturbed in the rue Dutot, now the rue du Docteur Roux.

As he grew more feeble and less able to work, his mind turned — as so often happens in old age—to the past, to memories of the great master and the glories of those days when, with Chamberland, Duclaux, Metchnikoff, — all of them now gone,—he had ‘assisted’ at the birth of a new science. It was a strange experience meeting him, for it was hard to realize that one was actually speaking to a person who had known and worked with the legendary figure which Pasteur has become to those of us who are his disciples. So much has happened in our subject since he founded it that one forgets how relatively short the space of years, and seeing and talking to Roux was like meeting someone who had known Saint Francis.

During my winter of teaching at the University of Paris I had occasion to make comparisons between French students and those of other nations with whom I had associated. In France the educated classes—a definition which there corresponds less than in other countries to the economically affluent — move forward largely as a result of competitive examination. Education being free throughout, the leaders of national life, whether political or otherwise, are composed more than elsewhere of the most industrious and intelligent of whatever social layer. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the peculiar qualities of French academic youth may be of considerable significance in the determination of the nature of national life in general.

In France the students may be of a wide range of ages, some of them having decided upon medicine relatively late in life, others coming straight from the lycée. Since their eventual standing depends upon actual capacity for success in the concours more than upon pleasing any individual professor, they adopt a critical attitude toward their courses. To lecture to a group of these French pupils is an amusing, though at times harassing, experience to a teacher accustomed to American conditions, He is greeted at each meeting of the class with considerable applause, but a poor lecture is sure to result in the departure of large numbers of students, and at the end may earn as much stamping as clapping from those who are left.

During my short incumbency of the Visiting Professorship at the University of Paris, there was a disagreement between the medical students and the academic administration. Apparently for political purposes, the government had allowed certain foreign students to gain admission to the Faculté de Médecine on a basis somewhat less rigid than that demanded of native applicants. The student body had given the administration one month in which to remedy this. When, at the end of this time, nothing had been done, they called a strike. I was to lecture on the first day of this strike, and in the morning was called on the telephone by the Dean of the School and informed that my class would have to be postponed. I went to the Medical School to see what was going on, and found a situation which would he inconceivable in an American institution.

The short Rue de l’École-de-Médecine was barred at the open end on the Boulevard Saint-Germain by a double row of agents, and in the street itself, between the old Medical School building on the one side and the laboratory buildings on the other, there was a milling crowd of about a thousand students. The buildings had been thickly placarded with large signs, ‘La France pour les Français, ‘ ‘A Bas les Métèques, ' and so forth, and with the names of professors of whom the strikers did not approve. Whenever a non-striking student tried to enter the buildings, he was taken by the scruff of the neck and literally thrown at the agents, who received him with open arms and passed him through their lines, grinning and enjoying the fun. Faculty members were allowed to pass in and out, in many cases with a respectful greeting or cheers.

This went on for three days. During that time no classes of any kind were held. On the fourth day the Dean came out, harangued the picketing crowd, and invited a committee of students to his office to talk the matter over. It was amicably settled by due concession on the part of the administration, and we all went happily back to work, trying to make up for lost time.

The French system has many defects in its purely academic and intellectual aspects, most of these being due to tradition and to the historical concentration of intellectual life in Paris. With some of the best talent in the world, and a scientific intelligence that has proved itself again and again in the course of the centuries, the French medical system will not be as efficient as our own until decentralization occurs, the provincial universities are brought to a point of distinction at least comparable with that of Paris, and the students are distributed to the provinces in groups sufficiently small to be handled in the individual manner which is necessary for sound medical teaching. But the independent spirit and the unwillingness to be entirely docile which the French student displays are qualities which, inculcated in some manner into our own student groups, might contribute in a very important way to the proper growth of the American academic system, and might often act as a corrective of the ever-recurring stodginess that inevitably develops here and there. Incidentally, they would add considerably to the color and picturesqueness of our university life.

There must be, in the French spirit and system, some element which has long been active in leveling men and women according to talent rather than by birth or possessions. For it can hardly be accident that so large a percentage of those important in French intellectual and political history have come from the stock of peasantry and the small bourgeoisie. One is constantly reminded of this by the statues and monuments in small villages such as those of Diderot in Langres and La Fontaine in ChâteauThierry. And this thought leads me naturally to the afternoon when I first read the testament of Louis Pasteur, great-grandson of Claude-Étienne, who bought his freedom from the Count of Udressier for four gold pieces of twentyfour livres; grandson of a tanner of Besancon; and son of a corporal of the 3rd Regiment of the line, later a tanner of Dôle, and his wife, the daughter of a village gardener.

In the restaurant on the big square in Versailles, I met my friend ValleryRadot. It was a rainy Sunday, and I had been wandering about in the stately gardens that one is accustomed to see in their summer glory, with flowers blooming, fountains in full play, and happy groups strolling along the paths. The paths were empty that day, gray, quenched in sleet, and melancholy as one of Verlaine’s poems. I was glad to be among people again and to see a friendly face; for nothing is more saddening than to wander alone and a little homesick in the emptiness of a wintry park where one has spent happy summer days in gay company. Vallery-Radot, with the sensitiveness for the mood of others that I found so common among my French friends, seemed to notice that I wanted companionship.

After lunch he invited me to come with him to his mother’s apartment in one of the old houses of the square, to see some personal effects of his grandfather’s that had not been shown to the public. His mother had recently died, and ValleryRadot was dismantling the apartment, trying to decide what to do with pictures, papers, and so forth, many of which had more than sentimental family value. He showed me pastel portraits done by Pasteur in his youth, writing utensils used by him, clothing, ornaments, furniture; letters written by men who had played important rôles in the golden age of French bacteriology. Among all the things he showed me there was one that moved me deeply and that testifies, more than anything that has been said or written, to the infinite goodness and tenderness of heart of the man whose brain created a new era in the history of medicine. It is Pasteur’s Testament. Vallery-Radot allowed me to copy it and gave me permission to publish it.

CECI EST MON TESTAMENT. JE LAISSE À MA FEMME TOUT CE QUE LA LOI ME PERMET DE LUI LAISSER. PUISSENT MES ENFANTS NE JAMAIS S’ÉCARTER DE LA VOIE DU DEVOIR ET GARDER TOUJOURS POUR LEUR MÈRE LA TENDRESSE QU’ELLE MÈRITE.

L PASTEUR

PARIS, LE 29 MARS, 1877. ARBOIS, LE 25 AOôT, 1880.

XXVI

God forbid that I should try to write about the Japanese and Chinese with any pretense of knowledge; for in writing of any foreign country today the traveler is hampered by competition with many who can speak with the authority of long residence and, often, scholarly insight. Once there were large white spaces on maps of the world in which there were no lines for rivers, marks for mountains, or dots for towns and cities. In those younger times, Marco Polo, Hakluyt, Captain Cook, Mungo Park, Burton, Stanley, and other adventurous wanderers could fire the imagination with fascinating accounts of new horizons and strange peoples. And, even better reading, the Munchausens and Mandevilles could tell unchallenged tales to fill the hearts of the restless with desire to believe. Today there is nothing left of this kind except the icy reaches of the poles, with impenetrable mountain ranges being named — for all we care — after American millionaires; and even were it discovered that there were great iron deposits under some ‘Socony Range’ in Little America, few of us would get any of the thrill that must have swept through innumerable hearts on the return of Columbus to Palos.

As for China and Japan, these are today better known to the world at large than certain areas in northwestern New Jersey. They have been widely written up and, in our own time, Chinese scholars like Lin Yutang and numerous Western residents of China like Crow are interpreting the Oriental customs and ways of thinking with authoritative information. And Gunther has accomplished a task in explaining their present political evolution which, as far as an interested but inexperienced observer can judge, could not have been performed with greater thoughtfulness and equity of judgment. There would be little sense, therefore, in adding another travelogue in the manner of Burton Holmes or Lowell Thomas.

I went to China at the invitation of the Peking Union Medical College to work with Chinese pupils on the methods of prevention of certain infectious diseases and to give lectures on a few allied subjects. Of course I could write about the country in the manner in which British lecturers and Dr. Duhamel have written of America, but I was really in China a little too long to do this with the needed assurance. Moreover, while my knowledge of China, qua China, is not great, my acquaintance with the Chinese is based on a long association with Chinese medical students and colleagues, many of whom have become intimate and affectionate friends. These were, to be sure, all of the upper intellectual tiers, but none the less able interpreters of the mentality and customs of their people. Yet I am keenly alive to my limitations, and make no claim to profundity of understanding. If, therefore, any opinions I express are at variance with those of others, I should advise the reader to accept the other fellow’s views without giving the matter too much thought. On the other hand, as will be seen, many things that I record were told to me by those more well-informed. These things I am inclined to take seriously myself.

For upward of twenty years I have had Chinese students in the various laboratories in which I worked, and I came to understand much about them which saved me from the patronizing sense of superiority which has characterized so much of the Western writings on their country. From Tsen, Chu, Wu, Tang, Zia, Yü, Huang, Wang, Lim, and Wei, I learned that the capacity of the cultured Chinese for comprehension, affection, friendship, and the appreciation of moral and artistic values is, at best, quite equal to anything the West has produced. Missionary-educated and conditioned by a preliminary training in Asiatic philosophy for the reception of the best that Christianity has to offer, these boys differed from their American fellow students largely in the fact that they were Christians in the spiritual sense of the word, actually guided in their behavior by what are colloquially spoken of as ‘Christian principles.’ Thus the work of earnest, missionaries has contributed materially to the development among the earlier Chinese converts of that pious docility which constitutes such an ideal soil for commercial exploitation when, in the usual course of events, business follows the Cross.

If only we had succeeded in similarly Christianizing the Japanese before they learned some of our other tricks, we should probably now control treaty ports in Yokohama and Kobe, with millionaires and unlimited markets and cheap labor; and the present disgraceful cutting in on our natural rights over the Asiatic continent might never have come to pass.

On the steamer across the Pacific I was still tired as a result of my hurried departure from a busy laboratory, and perhaps this influenced the opinions I gathered of my fellow travelers. More than that, however, my impressions were guided by my friend Polisson, whom I encountered unexpectedly in the smoking room on the first night out. The last time I had seen Polisson had been about five years before, when we had met in a café on the Cannebière in Marseilles and had together crossed to Tunis on the Messageries boat. He was one of those post-war wanderers who, for one reason or another, found themselves unable to readjust to the humdrum of civilian life after discharge from the armies in 1918. One met that kind all over the strange places of the world during the temporary outbreak of peace between 1918 and now.

Some of them, like Polisson, had no personal obligations, a little money, and intellectual curiosity. Others were disgusted with the trend of European civilization and wandered merely to get away from it. Some were voluntary political refugees, hating the developments at home. Others, again, were just restless adventurers, in the intellectual rather than the merely physical sense. I ran into many of these‘denaturalized’ ones on different occasions, and found them often among the most independent and intelligent types of their respective nations. There was the anti-Nazi German scientist who had abandoned a distinguished place at home to eke out a precarious living by practising first-class medicine in the native quarter of Mukden; there was the German ex-professor of philosophy whom I met in the poorest quarters of a Chinese city where he was frugally living and becoming daily more learned in Chinese philosophy and art; another, an Englishman, one of the most cultivated men I have ever met, had been walking and hitch-hiking through China for several years, living on a pittance from home, collecting photographs and sketches of frescoes and statuary in outof-the-way Chinese temples. There were others — but we must get on.

Polisson had lived in China since I had last seen him, had learned Chinese, and had become deeply interested in ceramics and jade carvings— a natural development, since at home before the war he had kept a little art shop in the rue St.-Augustin. Here he was, on his way back to Peking after a visit home, looking just as comfortably dilapidated and ungroomed as in Marseilles. His good-natured, round face was framed in a moth-eaten, untrimmed beard; his hair was uncut and unbrushed, and he wore what appeared to be the same black, badly cut suit he had had on five years before, except that there were new leather patches over the elbows. We were happy to meet again and sat drinking Canadian beer while the smoking room began to fill up with our fellow travelers.

These were troubled times, and, except for the passengers for Honolulu, the first cabin consisted almost entirely of oil promoters, machinery and automobile salesmen, and others engaged in some variety of profitable enterprise in the East, much disturbed because they were seeing the handwriting on the walls of commerce. For it was the general opinion that, whoever might be victorious in the present ‘incident,’ the easy pickings for the Western merchants were gone; either the Japanese would take over or, more amazingly insolent still, the Chinese themselves might desire to profit from their own markets and resources. Polisson, who spoke English like a native New Yorker, having lived there for a year, began to explain to me the species ‘Western merchant in the Orient.’

‘There is a slightly ridiculous arrogance in these mostly half-baked commercial employees,’ he said, ‘toward the race they are engaged in exploiting. They all have a little of the White God complex. Observe that group of redfaced men behind us who are drinking “gimlets.” They enjoy shouting “ Boy!” in severe voices, whether it is a drink — which it usually is — or any other service they desire; and when the drink arrives you may notice the often painful contrast between the commonplace appearance and ordinary manners of the “masters” and the spiritual faces and gentle courtesy of the servants. I have rarely seen a brutal Chinese face,

‘American dollars and English pounds,’ he continued, ‘at prevailing rates of exchange go a long way in China; and business agents, salesmen, and clerks who at home would live quite commonplace lives are able there to surround themselves with servants, assume the grand manner, and feel altogether like conquerors lording it over docile helots. The English set the standards, and the Americans ape them and are all very Kipling — writing “chits,” having “tiffin,” and so on. The top layer — who, in their native environments, might progress as far as the local country club —are quite horsey over there about the races and the feeble type of polo you will see them playing on Mongolian ponies. They all “love” the Chinese with the same amused condescension with which your Cincinnati Virginian who has settled in the Piedmont loves his “niggras.” (I met some of those when I visited a cousin a few years ago.)

‘As to friendship with educated Chinese, interest in Oriental art, culture, literature, and the incalculable treasure of their intellectual history— these you will find only among American, French, and German scholars, permanent residents, missionaries, doctors, and members of the diplomatic corps. In contrast to these, the commercial crowd still cling to an attitude toward the Chinese which was exemplified by the Opium War of 1839 and has been kept alive by the “treaty port situation,” which permits foreign powers to establish their own governments and jurisdictions on Chinese soil, collect customs, set up police and garrisons, and disenfranchise the natives in their own cities. One of my Chinese friends once told me with indignation of the exclusion of “Chinese and dogs” from a park in an important Chinese city.'

Thus Polisson. He may have been a little too bitter, because the beer was bad and, besides, he had become so ‘Chinese’ in his feelings that he seemed to resent the European ‘superiority’ almost as strongly as some of my Chinese friends.

XXVII

On the dock at Yokohama stood little Tamiya, waving his hat at me. He was rounder and fatter than I had known him, and he bubbled over with cordiality and friendship. At the Imperial Hotel, three other Japanese professors, all young, trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, were waiting. They were the men in charge of the new School of Hygiene which Rockefeller donations were building in Tokyo—a foundation probably superior in material equipment to anything of a similar nature in the United States. We spent the afternoon at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. They gave me everything I needed to transfer my cultures, and all the time I was working I was being photographed. Little spectacled assistants and even technicians were snapping kodaks in every corner. It is extraordinary how many Japanese wear spectacles. Is it a racial defect or is it the desire to appear learned? I did not venture to inquire.

Then I was taken the rounds of Japanese colleagues. In every office there was first a tea party, before we talked business. They requested transfers of my cultures and the demonstration of methods, but asked no embarrassing questions about my work for the Chinese. Indeed, the pose of the Japanese was that the ‘incident’ in China is something analogous to the English euphemism of the ‘white man’s burden.’ They only wish to confer the blessing of peace and friendship upon the Chinese, and are going to see that they get it if they have to kill them to do so. In the language of the woodshed, it hurts them more than it does the Chinese. That may be more true, in the end, than they now suspect.

At the invitation of the lovable and wise Nagayo, I lectured to the medical students of the Imperial University. The contrast of these students with our own and with the French ones was striking. Of course they understood little of what I was saying, though they are all taught English, but they were so courteously attentive that I almost believed they fully understood. In America, the students would have laughed or gone to sleep; in France, they would have stamped their feet and walked out.

Pierre Loti was right. The Japanese girls are charming. During a delightful but gastronomically trying dinner I caught Mitamura, the jolly professor of pathology, winking at me in genuinely American fashion. ‘Later,’ he said, ‘we go to a geisha party.’ It was in a guesthouse, a place of entertainment where parties are arranged and the landlady summons girls of the type and number required by the host. It was as jolly and innocent as a children’s party. Tamiya did card and sleight-of-hand tricks. The girls sang and danced. Mitamura had procured as my special companion a little geisha who looked as I had always imagined Madame Chrysanthème. She spoke English — strange, but comprehensible. ‘Do many geisha girls speak English?’ I asked her. ‘Not many yet,’ she replied, ‘ but we are getting ready for the Olympic Games.’ If this had been generally known, Japan might not have lost the Games last year. The evening was one of laughter and childlike gayety, and was altogether charming.

I had lunch with the Harvard Club of Tokyo. There were present, aside from American residents, a Japanese admiral, several Japanese professors and merchants. I sat next to a lieutenant commander of the Japanese Navy who had taken a degree at Harvard under Professor Kittredge and now, in addition to his naval duties, was the most distinguished scholar and translator of Shakespeare in Japan.

At lunch at the Kitasato Institute I was the guest of Dr. Shiga. There is among the older generation of my profession no one more distinguished or more nobly exemplifying the best standards of the medical scientist than he. With much reverence he showed me a little shrine which Kitasato had erected in the Institute garden to his teacher, Koch. There was in this, as in some other Japanese customs, something attractively simple and childlike. I saw another example of the same thing at Osaka, where little Dr. Ito showed me a temple in which, each year, teachers and students of medicine devote a day of thanksgiving worship in honor of the laboratory animals sacrificed ‘to knowledge’ during the previous twelve months. Can one imagine the faculty and students of an American medical school going to King’s Chapel once a year for a similar purpose?

My friend, a Swiss parasitologist, left his hotel room in Kyoto looking for the dining room. In the hall on the first floor he came face to face with a beautiful, flowerlike Japanese lady wearing the obi of an unmarried woman. She smiled, sucked in her breath politely, and bowed. He bowed. Thereupon she bowed again. Not to be outdone, my friend repeated his bow. She smiled some more and this time bowed twice. My friend was just about to bow again when a polite little Japanese behind him said, ‘Why don’t you go into the dining room? She’s the waitress.’

I, of course, did not dare to embarrass my hosts by political questions. They knew how I felt, since they were familiar with the nature of my mission. But this did not modify their friendliness. I left with the conviction that there are many in Japan — silent by necessity-who feel about it much as we do.

Western science in all its branches is thoroughly established in Japan. As far as medicine is concerned, hospitals and research institutes are in no essentials inferior to our own, or to those of Europe. Their organization is, in most cases, modeled on the governmentcontrolled plan of pre-Nazi Germany, although there are a few institutionslike the celebrated Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, Kayo University, and the new Rockefeller-donated Hygienic Institute — which have been founded entirely or partially by private benevolence. Japan began, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to send intelligent young men for prolonged tours of study to Germany, France, and England. Later, many came to the United States.

The absorption of Western knowledge soon became a state policy, systematically pursued. In consequence, progress was rapid, and Japan began almost immediately to contribute as well as to absorb. The great Kitasato helped Behring to develop tetanus antitoxin in 1892. Shiga, still active, and a perfect type of the kindly, distinguished scientist, discovered the dysentery bacillus. Hata, Nagayo, Takaki, Inada, Ogata — to mention a few of the older men only —have become important figures in the history of discovery, and it should be remembered that the Japanese Army medical service was the first to demonstrate— in the Russo-Japanese War — that typhoid fever is a preventable disease. There are, throughout Japan, excellent schools and hospitals; and there is in general, at present, no fundamental difference between Western and Japanese medical teaching or method.

It is erroneously assumed, however, that all Western ideas came to Japan after Perry’s visit in 1853. This is not strictly true, since long before that Japanese thought was profoundly influenced by information picked up from sea captains and travelers on the ships of nations permitted to carry on a limited trade. Professor Nagayo, the distinguished investigator of tsutsugamushi or river-valley fever, a disease which is a first cousin to typhus, published some years ago¹ an entertaining account of the dawn of Western medicine in Japan. His narrative is based on a novel of Kan Kikuchi’s which records the life of Sugita Gempaku, a Japanese physician who lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

There was, in those days, an inn on Honokucho Street in Yedo (Tokyo) in which a group of Japanese court physicians, a samurai, a monk, a scholar, several interpreters, and some other more convivial than learned companions were in the habit of gathering to drink wine and to meet a jolly Dutch sea captain, Karance by name, who delighted in entertaining them with accounts of Dutch customs and manners, apparently enjoying himself mightily by laughing at their questions and stumping them with mechanical puzzles which he carried in his pockets. In the end, as a rule, the good captain appears to have taken the edge off his legpulling by setting up his visitors to a very good wine called Chinda.

Most of the questions he was asked were trivial ones formulated largely for amusement, but Gempaku and a rival physician called Ryotaku — serious fellows— were eagerly curious about the state of Western medicine and science. And the captain, a well-informed mariner, showed them barometers, thermometers, and instruments of navigation, and told them a good deal about Dutch medicine and physics. By a fortunate coincidence, at this time both Gempaku and Ryotaku independently obtained, from one of the interpreters, copies of Kulm’s Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Holland in 1731, with a multitude of pictures of the organs of the human body colored in red and green. Gempaku had to borrow the price — the equivalent of three dollars — from his patron lord, through the good offices of a samurai, Ogura Saemon.

Now Gempaku and Ryotaku were eager to learn Dutch, so that they could read the legends under the pictures. And, further, they wanted to find out, by actual observation, whether these diagrams — so different from the classical opinions of the Chinese doctors whom the Japanese had heretofore followed — were true descriptions of body structure. The opportunity for this study soon presented itself, since there was to be an execution of a woman who had murdered her foster children. She was still beautiful, though over fifty, and was known as the ‘Greentea Hag.’ Ryotaku was so excited on the night before the promised dissection that he could not sleep a wink, and left his house at 2 A.M. in order to be on time. When, in great excitement, the party arrived at the execution grounds, they saw the severed head of the woman on an ‘exposure stand.’

The executioner, Toramatsu, did the dissecting, with much boasting of his skill, and the little group of scholars eagerly compared the corpse with the pictures in Kulm’s book. ‘Deep feeling formed a lump in every throat’ — I quote from Dr. Nagayo. It was all exactly like the illustrations. ‘They were stirred by the excitement of the demonstration.’ For the first half hour they ‘kept a deep silence, full of emotion.’ But on the way home they determined that they must study every detail of the human body after the model of this wonderful Dutch science. Ryotaku and Gempaku translated the book. There were difficulties for want of adequate instruction in the Dutch language. It took four years, during which Gempaku rewrote the translation twelve times, and there were still five points which they could not make out at all, and seventeen doubtful ones. Finally, however, against the pedantic Ryotaku’s advice, Gempaku published the work.

This was the real beginning of Western medicine in Japan.

XXVIII

‘You will find,’wrote my friend Dr. Zia, ‘that the Chinese world is completely different from your own. Yours was made in six days, and then the Creator rested. It was a rush job. He couldn’t have had much time for speculation about the rattles that might develop after the driving power that He put into your brains had gathered speed. P’an Ku, the Chinese Creator, took 18,000 years with a chisel and a mallet, fashioning our world out of chaos. Then Sui Jên, our Prometheus, by watching a woodpecker, got the idea of making fire with a stick and invented cooked meat. Charles Lamb’s story of the much later accidental discovery of roast pig is one of those superior British witticisms. When the Great Flood came in 2297 B.C. there was no panic, wholesale drowning, or hasty loading of lizards and snakes, pandas and dragons, and so forth, into a Noah’s Ark; but the learned Yü, with no fuss or excitement, quite sensibly built a few canals and sent the waters back into the Pacific. Then he devised practical mathematics with a knotted string, and the Chinese were all set for their simple wants in a permanent order which satisfied them.

‘P’an Ku, being in less of a hurry, took time to consider consequences and thought it better to leave out of the human experiment any of the Western Adam’s genius for scientific invention — perhaps because he questioned his ability to balance this by supplying brains enough to have such ingenuity used for wise purposes. P’an Ku must have felt that not even a great creating Deity could control the brains of men once he had let them loose on one of his planets. He thought that the capacity for metaphysical speculation was adequate to keep men occupied and perfectly harmless. Your Western Adam was given inventive genius without sufficient moral control; and so were devised industrialism, battleships, T.N.T., aeroplanes, and the like, to be used as children would handle a jackknife or a box of matches.

‘Well, it was possibly an experimental Creation; it is being thoroughly observed, and when the divine Experimenters have drawn Their conclusions, just as we do when an honestly conceived experiment turns out wrong, They will perhaps let this creation blow itself up, leave a few unspoiled chimpanzees with Professor Yerkes as caretaker, and try over again on a different young constellation, either omitting the capacity for invention or supplying an adequate equipment of moral sense to control it within reasonable purposes. With the suggested setup established on our disappointing planet, moreover, They might even leave Professor Yerkes to continue here and see whether, starting from scratch with a population of apes, he might not rebuild a world motivated by instincts and the spinal centres rather than by intellectual complexities, and eventually achieve something more on the model of Southern California.

‘The two civilizations of the East and the West might have learned so much from each other for the benefit of both,’ Zia continued. ‘But your Western conceit translated your greater material efficiency into a sense of inborn racial superiority and utilized it for purposes of subjugation and exploitation, instead of bringing it as a gift for strength and plenty to your Eastern fellows. The time is past for the amicable correction of your ways. The East has learned that it can save itself only by imitating you; and it is rapidly proving an adept pupil. It has already demonstrated that it can learn to play your game when it sets its mind to it.’

Nothing could have expressed the awakening of the East to the necessity of self-defense more clearly than this letter, and I wondered to what extent this enforced Westernization might destroy the ancient philosophical heritage of Asiatic thought which, sweeping across the passes from India, enriched by Confucius, Lao Tzŭ, Chuang Tzŭ, and Meng Tzŭ, had given the Chinese their highest qualities, but — at the same time — had rendered them helpless to resist Western aggression. I remembered the final paragraph of a thoughtful book by L. Adams Beck, who cites the hopes of an Indian sage that eventually the world might unite ‘the vigor of European action with the serenity of Asiatic thought.’

At Shan-hai-kwan one passes the Great Wall. Once within its grim, majestic reaches, which lie across the desolate landscape like a sleeping serpent, coils closely weaving across hills and down valleys, one feels that one has entered the old and mysteriously strange world of China.

If one stops over at Tientsin, this spell is partly broken. The splendor of the treaty ports has been quenched by the heavy hand of war. Victoria Road in Tientsin, with its great business houses and bank buildings, — reminding one in places of lower Broadway,-is like a street that has become drowsy and is slowly going to sleep. Many of the great mansions stand empty, and the deserted racecourse with its magnificent clubhouse seems doubly desolate as one imagines past scenes of holiday crowds and colorful gayety.

One has the feeling that here, in this outpost of commercial conquest, there reigned until recently opulence and a Victorian solidity of secure wealth and elegance of living that have been disappearing from the Western World itself these thirty years past. And when one speaks with any of the remaining representatives of this, incidentally, attractive type of merchant prince, staying on of necessity to conserve what may still be rescuable, one senses in them the discouraged acceptance of the end of an era, the sad conviction that the old days will never return, irrespective of who may win the war. And if one were sure that the Chinese rather than the Japanese would profit by the change, one would not be so easily moved to sentimental sympathy after the third brandy and soda. As it is, one is depressed —as one always is by the spectacle of passing magnificence. I felt somewhat as I had when, after the war, I first saw the curtainless and ‘ blind ‘ windows of the great empty palaces of Vienna, their cobbled courts with grass between the stones.

Peking is different. It is still China as it has always been, in spite of foreign invasion, and as it will always remain, whatever the Japanese may do. I often walked at dusk upon the great city wall, gazing out at the Winter Palace and the Temple of Heaven and over the wide expanse of endless alleys lined with low walls and houses; and I reflected that in these crowded compounds, as in those of many other cities and villages, the life of China, strong in patience and resistance, was marking time until the forces of disturbance had worn themselves out against its mighty inertia. China is changing. But her ultimate destiny will be determined not by external pressure, even pressure as powerful as that which Japan is now exerting, but by the ground swell that will rise from the depths of her racial solidarity and latent power; and when these waves roll in they will sweep her clean of the surface disturbances of foreign ambitions.

And this I venture to say much less from my own observations than from the quiet, inexhaustible capacity for taking beatings without feeling licked that is still undiminished after almost three years of disastrous warfare. No Chinese friend with whom I spoke during long evenings of intimate conversation ever seemed to have the slightest idea of ultimate defeat or surrender, and every Japanese victory—however exaggerated in the dispatches — was a victory of Pyrrhus which weakened the invader more than the vanquished. The Japanese Hercules has tackled a Hydra without an Iolaus to help him cauterize the wound wherever he knocks off a head. And two heads will keep growing where he removes one, until his brave strength will be spent. Writing this makes me almost sorry for the Japanese, for that’s the way one writes oneself into emotional jams.

Could I borrow the pen of a Loti or a Gide, I should be tempted to describe Peking, its noises and its smells, the evening crowds on Hatemen Street, the files of long-haired, coal-laden camels threading their way along a street that might be a Paris boulevard, among automobiles and rickshaws; its children and beggars; the strange, mysterious silences of its twisted alleys after dark; the surprise of passing through gates from sordid lanes into quiet and charming courts and gardens; and the majesty of its palaces (for, truly, the Winter Palace with its symmetric immensity is more impressive than Versailles). But it has been done before, and better than I could do it. I can only summarize that Peking had a charm that no other city except Paris has ever held for me. Outwardly strange, as of another world or even another planet, I felt immediately and happily at home, and could quite understand how those of my Western friends who had once been settled there for a year or two had no desire to leave.

I have said many admiring and appreciative things about the Japanese, but in Japan I felt that, as a foreigner, I was being courteously treated by a race whose good manners are proverbial. But still I remained — except with a few old friends-essentially a stranger; and I suspected that I was being ‘convinced’ that Japan was not as bad as she is painted. And truly I don’t think she is. But in China — was it the reunion with a group of my old pupils, the immediate association with a student body that differed from our own only in greater eagerness and appreciation, or the friendly hospitality of American, French, and English residents who understood and liked the Chinese? All these things helped. Yet, pleasant as all this was, I do not believe that these circumstances alone gave me the contented sense of at-homeness. It was so easy to like my amiable and patient rickshaw coolie, my doorman, my houseman and cook. There was an indefinable something that attracted me to the people in the streets and in the shops.

Perhaps I had been psychologically prepared to like and understand them by the friends who had, in an almost uninterrupted succession over twenty years, worked with me in the intimate companionship of the laboratory and had removed from my mind all sense of ‘differentness.’ At any rate, I felt as though I understood these people as I did my own countrymen, and that in spite of dress, language, and complete strangeness of habits and traditions, their reactions to suffering, joy, sorrow, and affection were essentially like our own.

XXIX

After these digressions I suppose it would be in order to say something about the medical work I did in China. But that will all come out when Sam Zia, Pang, and little Liu finish it and get results in the field. The thing that I want to and can write about with the confidence of information gained from reliable sources and personal observation,— a subject which, moreover, is close to my sympathies and interests, — is the attitude of educated Chinese youth to the present national crisis.

Few people fully appreciate the extent of the intellectual progress which was being made in China during the years immediately preceding the beginnings of Japan’s benevolent decision to bring order and culture to China. Under Wang Shih-chieh, in the early 1930’s, $29,000,000 was appropriated for educational purposes in one year, and 49,000 primary schools were established. In 1935, $37,000,000 was spent for similar purposes. Under the program initiated, Chinese factories in large centres were ordered to establish primary schools for employees; in the so-called ‘primary schools’ the pupils ranged from six to sixty years. In 1912 there were 2,790,000 school children in China; in 1935 there were 12,000,000. In 1912 there were 4 universities; in 1935 there were 82 universities and 29 special colleges with an aggregate of 44,000 students.

In the ‘Special Education Movements’ in Kiangsi, Hupeh, and other provinces, four-month courses were set up to prepare young teachers for distribution to villages all over the provinces in an attempt at mass education. An effort was made to teach reading, simple principles of hygiene, and enough military training to stimulate national feeling. With this went the wide distribution of pamphlets and an effort to develop local newspapers. The ‘New Life’ movement initiated by Madame Chiang Kai-shek had a similar purpose, and is still making headway in spite of the disorganizing effects of war.

In all these energetic and very practically conceived innovations, the students of China played a leading rôle. Academic and educated youth in China today is taking part in political and social reform much as similar groups did in the Europe of the early nineteenth century. Revolution seems to call out the latent idealism and sacrificial enthusiasms of the young, or it did in Europe formerly as it does in China today.

It is perhaps one of the great misfortunes of the modern Western World that, movements for change in economic and political organization are so exclusively initiated by pressure from below, with a leadership developed entirely out of the revolting oppressed or by professional and cynical theorists of revolution. The millions of the young, intelligent, and eager, whose eyes should be clear and pointed upward and from whom future leaders of idealism and vision should develop, have been with us in some unintelligible manner kept in swaddling clothes, and in the turmoils of the last twenty years have remained silent and passive. One wonders what might be the present conditions in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, and even in England and in our own country, had our university students played parts in moulding public opinion and forcing issues to which their ages and importance entitled them. Revolutions should not come entirely from below.

China’s students are playing heroic and enormously important parts in the evolution of their nation. It was they who early organized a movement to arouse national consciousness. In 1923 they led the strikes in Hong Kong. It was they who started the defensive boycott of the Japanese. In 1927, when General Chiang was marching on Nanking, they joined his colors in large numbers. It was they who made possible the mass educational movements of which I have spoken. At the time of the battle at the Marco Polo Bridge in 1937, they enlisted by hundreds in the 29th Army. They are now, unless still in training, performing the professional and technical services and furnishing the officers for the armies of defense.

It is they to a large extent who see ahead and who arouse the spirit of resistance and the national pride of the masses, who, as is generally the case, would see no further than their own noses. The students believe in ultimate victory and I have yet to meet one of them who feels that China should make peace as long as there is a Japanese soldier in North China or even Manchuria. Numerically, of course, they are a mere handful compared with the masses who must do most of the fighting. But they are the yeast. And we all know what a handful of yeast will do to the most placid and uncombative barrel of cider.

The contact of China with Western medicine is an ancient one, but the legendary accounts of the very earliest penetration of Western physicians into China are not easily substantiated. A scholarly effort to collect the facts on these matters has been made by K. C. Wong and my friend Wu Lien-teh in their History of Chinese Medicine. A number of physicians from various parts of Europe came to Asia in pre-Christian days, but these had little or no influence on Chinese medical thought. The same may be said of the staff of Western doctors attached to the courts of the Mongol conquerors in the thirteenth century. After 1600, a more effective introduction of Western medicine was accomplished by Catholic missionaries, notable among whom were Matteo Ricci (about 1600) and Father Torrentius, a Swiss whose real name was Schreck, who practised medicine and published a small treatise on human anatomy in the Chinese language between 1618 and 1630.

An interesting tale is told by Wong and Wu of the cure, in 1692, of a malignant fever at the court of the Emperor K’ang by Jesuit missionaries who had imported a small supply of cinchona bark from India. At about this time, also, a translation into Chinese of an eight-volume French work on anatomy, chemistry, toxicology, and pharmacology was made by Father Parrenin, but this — for reasons not very well known — was never published, though it is said to exist in manuscript copy, in the library of the French Academy and in the Dudgeon Library in China.

The first Western dispensary was probably that opened in Peking about 1700, by a French Jesuit, Brother Rhodes. Rhodes won the confidence of the Emperor by curing him of a boil on the lip, but narrowly escaped great displeasure when the Emperor discovered that four of the hairs of his sacred moustache had been clipped, when three might have been enough. The now traditional association of missionaries with medical service was firmly established by these noble friars, and was worthily continued by Franciscans and by the physicians attached to Russian missions into the eighteenth century.

It is quite impossible to follow in detail the adventurous and distinguished careers of the many medical missionaries who were sent out, chiefly from the United States and England, during the latter half of the nineteenth century. There were, in addition to these, some German, French, and Russian missions, both Catholic and Protestant, which did similar work. As a consequence, hospitals were founded in many of the larger cities, and these soon began to fulfill educational as well as purely practical functions. Young Chinese became interested, were employed as assistants, and many of them—unhampered by government regulations — took up the practice either of Western medicine alone or of a combination of Western methods with the old, traditional Chinese teachings, carrying the missionary influence far and wide through the country. A few young Chinese, such as Dr. Wong Fun, then began to seek medical education in Europe.

The times during which these early missionary hospitals were developed Were turbulent with political disorders and war, and the work was often delayed and hampered by the forced abandonment of well-organized and usefully functioning institutions. However, the fervor and self-sacrifice with which all obstacles were overcome by men who seem to have been both heroic and intelligent constitute the one bright chapter of Western penetration of the Orient, and one of which we have much reason to be proud.

At the outbreak of the present war, medical development had achieved extraordinary efficiency and had begun to react upon Chinese conditions and habits. The ultimate credit belongs to the large group of devoted missionaries who loyally labored for a century against great odds and often in peril of their lives. Much of their success, however, is due to the extraordinary intellectual receptivity of the Chinese people. If one is familiar with the type of purely metaphysical and Asiatic humanistic education which, until very recently, dominated the training of upper-class Chinese, it is little less than amazing to learn how rapidly the younger generation (most of them, of course, of the upper, wealthy, often merchant classes, but the general group distributed over all layers of economic levels) have been able to adjust themselves to Western standards and have — practically in one generation — developed men and women who are now taking over independently the responsibility for the development of Western science in China.

I have often said many unkind things about missionaries, and, if reports are to be believed, it is more than likely that in many places where they have interfered with habits of food, customs of dress, housing, and the moral standards developed by primitive races through ages of local adaptation, they have done a great deal of harm. Until I went to China, the only missionaries who had elicited my complete admiration were those Catholic orders like the White Fathers of Tunis, whose young men were annually sent into Equatoria with the statistical prospects of an approximate 50 per cent mortality.

I had seen isolated, devoted, medical missionaries like my friend Sam Cochran, who carried on through years of work in the interior of China at the expense of health and economic safety. Having thought of missionaries more as theologians than as medical men, I was apt to wonder whether it was not largely ignorance which gave these Westerners the arrogant confidence to believe that Christianity could contribute to the spiritual enlightenment of a nation which had lived for centuries under the teachings of Buddha and had modeled itself on the ideals of Confucius and his disciples. Indeed, if one compares the shrewd immorality of Machiavelli’s Prince with the noble Guide of Princes of Meng Tzŭ, one cannot help realizing how much more deeply the lives of Eastern nations have been influenced by the spirit of their great philosophers than have those of the Western races.

But these China missionaries were no bigoted evangelists. They were of the blood and spirit of the friars, and, in the history of Western avarice and exploitation in China, theirs is the consoling note. While Western materialism was gnawing the most valuable bits of the China coast away from its legitimate owners, and while merchants grew rich under the guns of civilizing battleships, these simple and devoted men and women were penetrating into the hearts of the Chinese and bringing them some of the best gifts Western intelligence had to bestow. There are those who believe that the present Japanese war will destroy much that was built up by the missionaries and their Chinese disciples, but no such fear is in my mind, both because of my intimate knowledge of many of the present native leaders of Chinese medicine and because of my trust in the fundamental common sense of the Japanese conquerors, who will realize how much they depend upon Chinese coöperation when the present situation comes back to a tenable equilibrium.

(Final chapters of the biography will appear in the May issue)

Also beginning in the May Atlantic

TO THE INDIES, by C. S. Forester

A novel of adventure by the author of ’Captain Horatio Hornblower’

RUMFORD PRESS CONCORD. N. H. U.S.A.