responsibility than any other officer of the camp. To draw forty
thousand people from tropical lands, grouping them on a sand plain only
a few hundred miles above the equator, is an undertaking pregnant with
danger, when considered from the standpoint of hygiene. Strange to say,
Marichchikkaddi's health is always satisfactory; but tons of
disinfectants have to be used. Malarial fever is ever present, but is of
a mild type. The outdoor dispensary does a rushing business, but only
seventy-five cases were sufficiently serious last season to be sent to
hospital, and only ten of these were fatal. The divers are prone to
pneumonia and pleurisy, and these diseases carried off five. The deaths
out of hospital totaled twenty-two.

In the hospital I saw a man with grizzled beard whose escape from death
bordered upon the marvelous. His head had been jammed four days before
between colliding boats, cracking his skull to the extent of letting the
brain protrude. He was rushed to the hospital to die, but had no
intention of passing to another world, the doctors learned. Sitting
upright on his cot-bed, the poor fellow said to me with an earnestness
almost compelling tears: "Help me to get out of this place, please. I
want to be with my boat, for there is no better diver than I am, and I
can earn a hundred rupees a day as easily as any man in
Marichchikkaddi."

As an illustration of the white man's supremacy, in dealing with black
and brown peoples, Marichchikkaddi probably has no equal. Here, in an
isolated spot on the coast of Ceylon, hours from anywhere by sea, and
shut off from the large towns of the island by jungle and forest wherein
elephants, leopards, and other wild animals roam, twelve or fifteen
Britishers rule, with an authority never challenged, more than forty
thousand adventurous Asiatics--men whose vocation is largely based on
their daring, and whose competing religions and castes possess the germ
of fanaticism that might be roused to bloodshed. The white man's control
is supported by the presence of two hundred policemen, it is true, but
these are natives. The keynote of this exposition of a multitude ruled
by a handful of Europeans is the absolute fairness of their control, of
course. Were justice non-existent, it would be inviting disaster for
the white official to apprehend a wrong-doer, place him on trial, and
personally administer with lash or birch the corporal punishment to be
witnessed any morning in front o