constitution to stand the system. In the stores is little or
no shoddy material; in general the stock is the best available. If a
biscuit or a bolt of khaki is better made in England than in the United
States the commissary stocks with English goods, which is unexpected
broad-mindedness for government management. But while prices are lower
than in Panama or Colon they are every whit as high as in American
stores; and most of us know something of the exorbitant profit our
private merchants exact, particularly on manufactured goods. The
government claims to run the commissary only to cover cost. Either that
is a crude government joke or there is a colored gentleman esconced in
the coal-bin. Moreover if the commissary hasn't the stuff you want you
had better give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a supply
of it just to oblige customers. Its clerks work in the most languid,
unexcited manner. They have no object whatever in holding your trade,
and you can wait until they are quite ready to serve you, or go home
without. True, most of them are merely negroes, and the few Americans
at the head of departments are chiefly provincial little fellows from
small towns whose notions of business are rather those of Podunk,
Mass., than of New York. But lolling about the commissary a half-hour
hoping to buy a box of matches, one cannot shake off the conviction
that it is the system more than the clerks. Poets and novelists and
politicians may work for "glory," but no man is going to show calico
and fit slippers for such remuneration.

Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method banished from the
Zone. In the Canal Record, the government organ, the government
commissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats at $1 each. The
"Record"! It is like reading it in the Bible. Witness the rush of
bargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no means of one gender. Yet
those splendid rain-coats, as manager, clerks, and even negro sweepers
well knew and could not refrain from snickering to themselves at
thought of, were just as rain-proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth. I
do not speak from hear-say for I was numbered among the bargain
hunters--"recruits" are the natural victims, and there arrive enough of
them each year to get rid of worthless stock. Ten minutes after making
the purchase I set out to walk to Corozal through the first mild shower
of the rainy season--and arrived there I went and laid the bargain
gently in the