al, it is even more emphatically the first duty of a
community or a commonwealth.

This is Asia's most important lesson for America.

Singapore, Straits Settlements.

{186}

XIX

THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA

The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter,
and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees.
The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and in
Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer and
winter are practically alike.

"But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime," a
fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise at
not finding it hotter than it really was--the speaker evidently
forgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month as
July, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with us
become the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to the
equator that for it "all seasons are summer," and the _punkah wallas_
(the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made
tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth of
July.

The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on the
tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms are
silhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavy
foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; the
sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches,
casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the city
are rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and uncleared
jungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the
unending {187} life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak.
Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a
long while because of the great number of lions found in the
neighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby,
and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.

There is probably no place on earth in which there have been brought
together greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. I
was told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversity
of color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I am
prepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them
about as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian
in the main--sharp noses, thin lips,