not a winged boat, a
bird afloat sailing round the purple peaks remote, as Buchanan Reed
put it in his "Drifting" picture of the Vesuvian bay, for Bigelow
uses a paddle. There has been a good deal of curiosity as well as
indignation about his papers on the handling of our Cuban expedition
before it sailed, and it is possible he was guilty of the common fault
of firing into the wrong people. He was in Washington in June, and
he and I meeting on the Bridge of Spain over the Pesang in Manila in
August, we had, between us, put a girdle about the earth. Some say such
experiences are good to show how small the earth is, but I am more than
ever persuaded that it is big enough to find mankind in occupation and
subsistence until time shall be no more. In the dock at Hongkong was
Admiral Dewey's flagship Olympia, and while she had the grass scratched
from her bottom, the gallant crew were having a holiday with the zest
that rewards those who for four months were steadily on shipboard
with arduous cares and labors. H.B.M.S. Powerful, of 12,000 tons
displacement, with four huge flues and two immense military masts,
presided at Hongkong under orders to visit Manila. The mingling
of the English and Chinese in Hongkong is a lively object lesson,
showing the extent of the British capacity to utilize Asiatic labor,
and get the profit of European capital and discipline, an accumulation
that requires an established sense of safety--a justified confidence
in permanency.

The contrast between the city of Hongkong and that of Manila is one
that Americans should study now, to be instructed in the respective
colonial systems of England and Spain. Hongkong is clean and solid,
with business blocks of the best style of construction, the pavements
excellent in material and keeping, shops full of goods, all the
appliances of modern times--a city up to date. There are English
enough to manage and Chinese enough to toil. There are two British
regiments, one of them from India, the rank and file recruited from
the fighting tribes of northern mountaineers. There are dark, tall
men, with turbans, embodiment of mystery, and Parsees who have a
strange spirituality of their own, and in material matters maintain
a lofty code of honor, while their pastime is that of striving while
they march to push their heads into the clouds. There are no horses in
Hongkong, the coolies carrying chairs on bamboo poles, or trotting with
two-wheelers, an untiring substitut