wn as we emerged from Miraflores tunnel; soon we swung around
toward the houses, row upon row and all alight, climbed the lower slope
of Ancon hill, and at seven I descended in familiar, cab-crowded,
bawling Panama.

CHAPTER VII

It might be worth the ink to say a word about socialism on the Canal
Zone. To begin with, there isn't any of course. No man would dream of
looking for socialism in an undertaking set in motion by the Republican
party and kept on the move by the regular army. But there are a number
of little points in the management of this private government strip of
earth that savors more or less faintly of the Socialist's program, and
the Zone offers perhaps as good a chance as we shall ever have to study
some phases of those theories in practice.

Few of us now deny the Socialist's main criticisms of existing society;
most of us question his remedies. Some of us go so far as to feel a
sneaking curiosity to see railroads and similar purely public utilities
government-owned, just to find how it would work. Down on the Canal
Zone they have a sort of modified socialism where one can watch much of
this under a Bell jar. There one quickly discovers that a locomotive
with the brief and sufficient information "U.S." on her tender
flanks--or more properly the flanks of her tender--gives one a swelling
of the chest no other combination of letters could inspire. Thus far,
too, theory seems to work well. The service could hardly be better, and
recalling that under the old private system the fare for the
forty-seven miles across the Isthmus was $25 with a charge of ten cents
for every pound of baggage, the $2.40 of today does not seem
particularly exorbitant.

The official machinery of this private government strip also seems to
run like clockwork. To be sure the wheels even of a clock grind a bit
with friction at times, but the clock goes on keeping time for all
that. The Canal Zone is the best governed district in the United
States. It is worth any American's time and sea-sickness to run down
there, if only to assure himself that Americans really can govern;
until he does he will not have a very clear notion of just what good
American government means.

But before we go any further be it noted that the socialism of the
Canal Zone is under a benevolent despot, an Omnipotent, Omniscient,
Omnipresent ruler; which is perhaps the one way socialism would work,
at least in the present stage of human progress. Th