, jungled hills to look on by day and moonlight, and to
roam in on Sunday--unless you are a policeman seven days a week. It is
possible that perpetual summer would soon breed quite a different type
of American. The Isthmus is nearly always in boyish--or girlish--good
temper. Zone women and girls are noted for plump figures and care-free
faces. And there is a contentment that is more than climatic. There are
no hard times on the Zone, no hurried, worried faces, no famished,
wolfish eyes. The "Zoner" has his little troubles of course,--the
servant problem, for instance, for the Jamaican housemaid is a thorn in
any side. Now and then we hear some one wailing, "Oh, it gets
so--tiresome! Everybody's shoveling dirt or talking about the other
fellow." But he knows it isn't strictly true when he says it and that
he is kicking chiefly to keep in practice. Every one is free from
worries as to job, pay, house, provisions, and even hospital fees, and
the smoothness of it all, perhaps, gets on his nerves at times. I
question whether "the Colonel" himself loses much sleep when a chunk of
the hill that bears up his residence lets go and pitches into the
canal. It sets one to musing at times whether the rock-bound system of
the Incas was not best after all,--a place for every man and every man
in his place, each his allotted work, which he was fully able to do and
getting Hail Columbia if he failed to do it.

Which brings up the question of results in labor under the
pseudo-socialist Zone system. Most American employees work steadily and
take their work seriously. It is as if each were individually proud of
being one of the chosen people and builders of the greatest work of
modern times. Yet the far-famed "American rush" is not especially
prevalent. The Zone point of view seems to be that no shoveling is so
important, even that of digging a ditch half the ships of the world are
waiting to cross, that a man should bring upon himself a premature
funeral. The common laborers, non-Americans, almost dawdle. There are
no contractor's Irish straw-bosses to keep them on the move. The answer
to the Socialist's scheme of having the government run all big building
enterprises is to go out and watch any city street gang for an hour.

The bringing together into close contact of Americans from every
section of our broad land is tending to make a new amalgamated type.
Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their broader-minded
fellow-count