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breast-cloth and her legs bare below her panung,-who spits from her blackened teeth a blood-red spurt of betel juice and glares with open malice. A properly humble visiting mind might understand her disapproval of pallid strangers with ridiculous, stiff, uncomfortable clothing, simpering manners, outlandish speech, and disgusting odors of alcohol and tobacco smoke.

Old women, however, being the guardians of old things, are almost always hostile to the new. The young Siamese do not resent the education laws, the sanitation, the railroads that are being brought to them by their princes. It is said that they envy their betters the chance to study abroad, and thus acquire directly a Western illumination, more than they envy them their birth and right to rule. Perhaps they envy them also the streak of exceptional capacity that seems to run through the princes. They are a remarkable group of men for other reasons than just their rank and their responsibilities. The list is long and hard to read, whether the names are given in transliteration out of the royal Pali alphabet or in English equivalents. Prince Nagar Svarga (called Nagung Sawung) is royal adviser and a strength to the kingdom. Prince Amoradat is secretary of the Red Cross and so administrator of the ambitious public-health programme being carried on through that organization. Prince Kambaeng Bejra builds and maintains railroads. Someone suited for every necessity seems discoverable. One young man, after a Beaux Arts training, devotes himself to the study of Khmer architecture, out of which the Siamese architectural idiom was derived, and serves the State in preserving old temples as well as in designing new ones whose weird, glittering beauties do not fall noticeably beneath the standards of the ancients.

Youth holds on to what is worth while in the past as it reaches out for the new.

Communication and transportation are, of course, the necessary nerves of unification and growth. The task of H. R. H. Prince Kambaeng Bejra is not simple and calls out the extraordinary energy and power which that prince possesses. He has an example of successful railway maintenance near at hand. The traveler going down the peninsula bursts suddenly out of Siam where the railway runs between pressing jungle walls into open spaces where the same jungles have been conquered and cleared. At the very border of the Federated Malay States the long-standing achievements of British administration are attested by well-policed highways and an appearance of established order. In his own territory the Siamese administrator cannot run a train at night, even now, without patrolling every mile. It is said, although for this no one is willing to stand as authority, that within the last two years more than one jungle elephant has charged out of the immense florid thickets and attempted with some success butt a puny man-made train off the track. Trains do run, however, with precision and comfort, making it possible to go back and forth from Singapore without braving the choppy terrors of the Gulf.

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III

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The works of Imperialism all around Siam may be achievements to emulate; but the political circumstances are a threat. A small triangle of rice-swamp, jungle, and mountain wilderness, inhabited by a few millions, cannot hope to remain the only free spot in southern Asia just by wishing. For about six centuries after Kublai Khan drove. them southward out of his empire they made a yearly bow to the nominal

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suzerainty of China, but it was only a bow and they got weary of giving even that. In the nineteenth century, when they were casting off these vestigial bonds, their neighbors, Shans and Burmese and Malays on west and south, were slipping into the hands of British rulers; and on the north and east the Laos and Annamites into the hands of the French. Their policy of imposing imperialistic benefits on themselves might be interpreted as an effort to keep abreast of neighbors who receive those benefits from alien Western hands, and so to render Siam less obvious prey for invasion and control.

A complete cynic who had no faith that any motives but the most material actuate imperial foreign offices might say that the Siamese are unmolested because across their narrow triangle of free territory the British and the French find themselves unpleasantly face to face. Those two nations have obvious reasons for not wanting to share a boundary in Asia which might be so fertile of difficulties, a boundary of jungle and mountain, illdefined and infested with tribes which might be hard to control.

As the French came westward from Saigon and the British east into Burma, they hesitated and eyed each other. The French did not escape actual conflict with the Siamese. The Indo-Chinese peoples over whom the French had acquired domination were blood relatives and prehistoric enemies of the Thais. Boundary disputes broke into guerrilla dueling in the 1890's. But the two Western Powers saw whither this might lead and in 1896 they signed an agreement between themselves, to be extended later, which defined the limits of Siam and constituted a mutual promise between these strangers not to encroach on the Siamese kingdom.

So within a constricted circle the Siamese Princes have been, in a degree,

at liberty to work out their people's destiny; but it is a liberty that seems precarious, unquiet, and charged with responsibility. There is almost an air of hurry about the effort, as if they feared the opportunity might not last.

The rights that powerful neighbors demand for themselves, even of a free country, are not always consistent with what a free country may consider best for its own interests. Take the question of opium. It is a comparatively recent problem for the Siamese; their first experience with opium and their first adoptions of Western ideas came together in the middle of the last century. There was prohibition of the dangerous new drug, with public burnings and preaching and other useless demonstrations, until the Government decided to get what benefit it could out of a bad business. Opium-dealing was farmed out and a substantial part of the State revenue was obtained from a traffic which the State did not cease to condemn and discourage. Supplies came largely from British India. The agitation which swept through the Orient at the end of the century was shared in Siam and the Government made its disapproval more effective by changing the farming-system into complete control through smokers' licences.

The difficulty of having powerful neighbors became manifest when the Siamese Government decided that it must find a substitute for the opium revenues, which were then nearly a fourth of the total income, if it was to suppress the vice still further. The ricegrower seemed to be paying all he could scrape together in ordinary taxes. The obvious resource was a tariff on the imports which the imperial Governments of Europe (and America) put at Siam's door. Here is where freedom had a condition. The State found itself bound by treaties, the same treaties which protect it from aggression and

encroachment, not to tax such imports. In an official statement before the health conference of the Oriental Red Cross Societies, Bangkok, November 1922, the Minister of Finance said, "The want of power to readjust her revenues, as required, is one of the reasons which may deter this country from putting into force the measures having for their object the registration of smokers'-in other words, the measures for suppressing the opium habit.

Other questions are not so complex. In a brave fight against the hookworm, Western intervention, exerted through the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, has been a necessary aid. There has been foreign help, too, in the effort to collect into hospitals the numerous lepers and begin their cure with chaulmoogra oil. It would require an acute and determined mind to draw any lesson for America out of the Siamese experiments. There are American minds at work on the experiments themselves, as advisers to the State and in the technical boards for public improvement. Americans are on the ground to supplement what princes have been able to learn at first hand in American and European schools. But to bring back out of that alien and unique situation anything useful to us is difficult. Careful study might accomplish something, however, and we are not so established in our own political maturity that we can afford to neglect any hint.

Are we, in truth, ready for, or interested in, any imperialism in our own dooryard? If we mean what we frequently say about our benevolent desires to weld the whole of two continents into one harmonious and developed unity, if we are willing to share a cultural hegemony of the two Americas with the elements of Hispanic civilization which are comparable to our own Anglo-European ideas — we might

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learn something in method from the Siamese royal family, whose laboratory is only slightly more populous than New York and Chicago taken together.

The one inevitable lesson is that imperialism at home- or over your next-door neighbors is possible, in accord with our avowed political ethics, only if there exists a sincere and wellunderstood impulse of brotherhood. If the Siamese princes are capable of imposing Western civilization on their own countrymen it is largely because there is no suspicion of ulterior purposes behind the rigorous, exacting laws for improvement. We cannot make laws for our neighbors; and we cannot even make fruitful suggestions unless we are purged of our conviction of superiority and free from the taint of selfishness.

Even then we may be helpless. It is hard to be certain that the Siamese civilizers are not helpless. In one of their Western-like houses, in an atmosphere of cultivated hospitality and intelligent worldliness, the whole programme seems feasible if not easy. But after the evening is done the visitor from the West is bowed out through the front gate into the road. The liveried servants withdraw and the compound goes back to its forest silence. At the entrance to that circle of cosmopolitan and generous thought lies still the old world of the klong and the house boat. The coolie, for whom all the efforts are invoked, is sleeping on the poop deck of his dwelling on a square of ragged matting, with the water lapping under his head and visions of bigger ricebowls in his dreams. His wife is rocking one of the next generation behind him in the shadows. In the minds and hearts of these is the answer to the problem of future change. The stranger is shut out. The native apostle of improvement is fascinated by the question as to how far into this mystery his own campaign can penetrate.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

CHRISTMAS UNDERGROUND

THE day began as its predecessors. At 6.45 the sergeant's whistle pierced our sleep. 'On your feet, wolves!' he shouted, and flung up the blanket that covered the abri's entrance. Protestingly we drew ourselves out of our woolen warmth into the cutting dampness of underground. Our teeth chattered as we wound our putties. It was n't till later, when we were standing about the field kitchen burning our lips with tin cups of coffee, that a voice suggested, 'Merry Christmas.' The The proper answer given and received was 'Merry as hell!'

Our feet squelched in the liquid mud that chilled us through the rubber, and from habit we gazed at the dun waves of earth which undulated toward the lines. Distant guns struck like hammerblows at the leaden sky. Someone cursed the mail. There was reason. Since our division had moved back en repos sixteen days ago we had had not a letter. Furthermore, we had had no pay. Half of us had no tobacco, and the other half had too little to lend. Without 'work,' without our sources of illusion, we were miserable. We lived in the timbered cellar of a squashed granary and we moved through the routine of repos cold and complaining.

The day continued indifferently. We stood inspection and our feet went numb. Surrounding an iron marmite we chipped the skin from slimy frozen potatoes. 'Fry 'em up, cook!' we begged. We quarreled as to whose turn it was to search for firewood. 'General' Wallace, so called because he washed more often than Pershing, heated a

pail of water and took a bath in his rubber basin. 'Drip on your own blankets!' we protested, angered by his virtue, and were delighted when the basin collapsed. The Lieutenant had been seen driving off in his staffcar. "Trust him!' we growled, thinking of our empty stomachs. "Back to Noyon for a good meal!'

Our gloom deepened with the early dusk. Christmas was not an event on this calendar. We lay humped in our blankets, thinking of warmth and home, or sat about the stove 'crabbing' in a chorus of contempt. With elaborate irony O'Brien read aloud the headline from an old Times: 'Boys At Yaphank Suffer In Rain.' In a far corner a mouth organ whined sourly. 'Oh, shut up, can't you!' Beside a candle Vosberg read and surreptitiously munched some chocolate. Where he had gotten it we did not know. It was too small to share. But we damned him in our envy.

The cook appeared. 'It's snowing,' he remarked. We did not care about that. 'What's for supper?' we asked. 'Stew.' 'What, no fried potatoes? No rice pudding? Hell, is n't it Christmas!' 'No lard. No rice. Stew,' said the cook laconically.

'I want four men up here,' called the sergeant from the abri door.

Those of us who climbed up into the night found the sergeant beside the rattling staff-car. Silently he flicked his torch into the tonneau. It was bulky with canvas mail-sacks. 'Ye-ah! Mail!' we shouted as we hauled them out. And beneath the sacks on the floor were two cases of golden-neck bottles.

'Who 'll trade Fatimas for Camels?'

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'Hank, see what m' girl made me knitted 'em herself. . . .' 'Aspirin, castor oil capsules, and Foot Ease: there's a merry present for you! 'Who 'll have some fudge? .' 'Say, will you listen to this: "Oh, Dick, how I can picture you, wandering through No Man's Land, lantern in hand!" How do they get that way!.. 'Here's looking at you, Slim! "Add a cup of milk, butter size of walnut, and serve hot." Great idea that.... .' 'Is that soap or candy?' 'Cripes, Sally Winslow's engaged!'

We sat in the aureole of a lantern hung from the beams. Two splintered doors laid on empty fuse-cases served as our table. The stove's belly glowed a dull red. The warm air was scented with the freshly opened sweets, the soap almost a Christmas fragrance. We read the familiar handwriting on our packages, then tore open the paper and fingered the dainty tissue within (Wow, how dirty our hands were!); we dropped the red ribbons round our necks and drew forth our presents! The marmite of stew steamed on the table, and our tin cups were filled again and again with nectar. No wine will ever taste quite like that from our old tin cups, stained black in the inside with their blend of coffee, pinard, and rum. Licking the gravy from their knives, some slit open their letters while they ate; others kept the packet in their breast pockets for private reading. Our letters as much as told us we were heroes and the champagne gave us strength to believe it. Hunger was surfeited. We were warm at last.

'Rabbit' Kindall, who had nine aunts, climbed on a box and claimed the knitting championship. He exhibited a worsted helmet without any face. 'See, you put it on, and there you are safe as an ostrich.' And a cootie string. 'A what?' we shouted. 'I'll read the directions: "Dear Rob

ert, I am sending you a cootie string. It was recommended to me by Mrs. Keswick. We have been told that you boys tie them about your waist. The cooties are attracted to the worsted, and when the trap is full all you need to do is hang it on a tree and come away refreshed." "Try it!' we cried, rocking with laughter. A specimen was obtained without much difficulty and placed on a sheet of paper, close to the 'trap.' With one look at the worsted it fled in the opposite direction.

And now the mouth organ was in a frenzy and the 'Kentucky Colonels' (Privates, Second Class) were clogging. We sang. We sang of Rinky Dinky, Madelon, The Tattooed Lady, and other warriors too humorous to mention. We sang:

I want to go home,

I want to go home!

The bullets they rattle; the cannons they roar,
I don't want to go to the Front any more.
Take me over the sea

Where the Allemands can't get at me.
Oh, my! I don't want to die.

I want to go home!

But Tom, our tenor, and the biggest man in the Section, had fallen asleep beside the stove. 'Wake up, Tom. Come and sing, Tom - it's Christmas.' Tom shook himself and climbed to his feet. 'Goin' out t' get th' Germans,' he announced thickly. In this mood, swaying slightly, his big fingers stretched rigidly open, Tom frequently sought 'the Germans.' But never found them. We sang on.

We had subsided into our blankets and with candles beside us were reading our mail when there sounded the clump of boots on the steps. Tom appeared in the doorway. If he had not found the Germans he had certainly found the snow. It marked him where he had fallen. 'Merry Christmas, Tom,' someone called. 'Stars are out,' said Tom, gazing at us solemnly. We waited in

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