sans.

"Gorgas had his troubles, too, but he never paid any attention to them," said one of his colleagues on the Zone. "He kept his goal in mind and proceeded straight toward it. On he went with his mosquito bars, his tile drains, and his scavenger squads. Was someone else's work written up more glowingly than his? It did not bother Gorgas. Did congressional committees quarrel with him because of the money he was spending for sanitation? He secured as nearly as he could what he thought necessary and went ahead."

Goethals in this: Goethals supervised everything himself and attended to thousands of minute details; Gorgas worked out a general plan and put the responsibility for its details into the hands of those whom he could trust. Both systems were successful. That is one of the wonders of Panama. While Goethals was always in supreme command, Gorgas was a departmental head and ranked Goethals in the army so that his authority in his work was as great as was that of the chief engineer in all the work.

The achievements of this patient philosophical kindly doctor were based upon the experience of Walter Reed, the army doctor who cleaned Havana by attacking mosquitoes. Gorgas was one of Reed's assistants in Cuba and to him fell the

healthy workers, the clean floor of the Zone were concrete illustrations of what Gorgas had done. Sibert could point to the giant structures of Gatun; Gailliard, to the deepening chasm of Culebra; and Williamson could show the locks at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel as proof of where the money went. Gorgas could have organized an excursion through the French cemeteries as a concrete negative proof of what he was accomplishing, but he didn't do that. He patiently plugged ahead, trying to make the committees understand, and slowly but surely winning their understanding and appreciation and the undying gratitude of the American people.

In sanitation, particularly, genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, and Gorgas is a genius. His work was thor

task of apply

ing the discov

eries of this doctor in the Canal Zone. The result is the Panama Canal, built on the failures of four hundred years and at a cost of human life marvelously small in comparison with the tremendous sacrifices of the French. The Havana campaign was Gorgas' raw material. He forged the tools that purified the Zone and that will forever rob the tropics of their terror for the white man.

First, he kept the American workers. in the Zone alive. That was the greatest of his exploits. Then he made the Zone a sanitary paradise and attracted to it. the best and most efficient workmen of the world.

During the nine years of the prosecution of canal work by the French, 1041 persons died of yellow fever in Ancon Hospital alone. As the Jamaica negro

is not susceptible to yellow fever, these figures apply only to the whites, mostly Frenchmen. Throughout the Isthmus, during those nine years, at least twice as many Frenchmen died of the disease. The French averaged 1606 white employes at any one time on their rolls, and General Gorgas believes they lost in the nine years not only one hundred and twenty-five per cent of their average force (as the figures indicate), but probably many more.

What is the record of death under Gorgas? The average white force of the Americans has been 6449. Had the ratio of the French prevailed, 4433 white men would have been in their graves on those crawling hillsides at the end of five years of digging.

Still Colonel Goethals says that the Zone is not a white man's country.

"We get lazy here after a while," he said to me as he busied himself with the thousand details of his daily job.

"You don't look it," said I. "Well, I get away some-and I was born in a keener climate," he replied with

a laugh; "but a generation of American children born here would become as lazy as the natives, if they remained all their lives." But you cannot induce William C. Gorgas to say that the Canal Zone is not a white man's country. "The tropical zone is man's natural latitude," says General Gorgas, when you ask him about the marvelously reassuring vital statistics of that ten-mile strip in the stinking steaming jungle. "Before he found fire and furs he would have considered continental United States a beastly cold, barren, and uninhabitable country. The temperate zones have only become living places for man since he discovered artificial means of comfort. I have been in the tropics at work since 1898, when I went to help clean up Havana, and my conclusion is that latitude has nothing to do with health."

The tropic climate, of course, plays its part in enervation; it is advisable for all "white folks", say the doctors, to come into a more bracing atmosphere at least every two years. But the fevers and plagues of ten years ago have vanished

as the mists on Toboga Island vanish when the sun rises in the Pacific.

Gorgas says now, looking back on his ten years in the Zone, that the Panaman and West Indian learned early what was required of them in the sanitary line. His real troubles came with his superiors, he says, in securing co-operation and support. After that, aside from the gigantic amount of manual labor involved, Gorgas professes that his job with Nature and human beings was easy. But the task he tackled with the fever immunes of Panama and the West Indian islands was not child's play. Although it has long since been proved that fevers come from mosquito bites and not from dirt, it was necessary to general health and working conditions that the Panaman and West Indian be kept clean, and Gorgas achieved that miracle. Gradually the fearful smells that used to desecrate the soft tropic airs of that land have

been dissipated in Panama and Colon; the zones of repulsion in the streets of the cities and around the thatched huts of the jungle are almost gone.

To clean the West Indian, who is immune from fevers, was a triumph of intelligence, tact, and vigor. In the first place the negro preferred his looselyconstructed shack, full of bunks and rooms, to the sanitary converted freight cars and bungalows provided by the Government. To the shack he could bring his wife and get the food he liked; in the government lodging he had to cook for himself and was ill-nourished often as a consequence. Again he liked the freedom of his own kind of hut and gladly let the jungle grow around it to shut out the prying eye of the white inspector. It was a toilsome task to make these thick-skulled children of the jungle understand that, while Yellow (Continued on page 940)

C

EASELESSLY the tower man at Redondo Beach sweeps the horizon with his glass. Half a mile away three bronzed men in close-fitting bathing suits lounge about the bathhouse beside a queer looking motorcycle. Far out in the surf the bathers stop their play; their hands go to their eyes to shade them from the blinding sun; anxious faces are turned toward a particular spot. A moment before a man was there swimming easily through the rollers. Now he is gone. The lookout, eyes close to his binoculars, reaches for the push button. The dark-skinned life guards leap to the cycle and with warning calls, are down

THE MILE-A-MINUTE LIFE GUARDS "Though it has been in use only one season, the motorcycle life-saving outfit has fifteen res cues to its credit, and has answered about twenty-five calls a month."

the beach at terrific speed, possessors of the right of way, bent on an errand of life.

Seated behind the driver, the man who is to do the actual rescue work buckles on a life belt as the fireman rushing to a blaze on the swinging fire truck, slides into raincoat and boots. He takes a metal buoy from the side-car and sits poised, ready to leap from the machine and dash into the surf the moment the point of vantage is reached. As the rescuer dashes into the surf, his fellow unrolls the reel of wire rope attached to the buoy. People in the crowd assist to get out the pulmotor and blankets. Bandages are laid out in case the rescued person should have been swept against piles or rocks. The stretcher is ready. if necessary, to rush him to the hospital on the side-car. The mile-a-minute life guards, with the most efficient, most

rapid service of the kind in the world. are at work to cheat the grim specter.