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whole balance of the national life and the future course of their history; and other Asiatic peoples, less finely endowed possibly with the civic virtues than the Japanese, are now doing the same thing. With immense effort, with obvious exaltation, and with an intelligence sometimes naïve but nearly always admirable, Asia is adopting our ideals, our codes, our aspirations; trying to emulate our standards, of which it admits the superiority, both openly and tacitly. And our reply is to raise the cry of 'Asiaticism' and to look for another Attila! It would be ungenerous, were it not so silly.

Nor is the economic bogey, which many, including Dean Inge, take a gloomy pleasure in surveying, so very dreadful. A rich Asia would be a more profitable business neighbor for Europe and America than a poor Asia. The markets which meet the demands of eight hundred millions of Asiatics, no longer content to be the camp followers of the progressive white races, but themselves taking their place in the advancing line, would offer illimitable opportunities to our industries. It is at least as reasonable to argue thus as to assert that, once the yellow races establish effective economic competition with the whites, the latter will be driven out of business. Such prophets are determined that Europe shall have its back to the wall somehow if not in one way, then in another. They are determined that their monster shall have a name, and that if one name does

not fit, another shall be found which does. It is, as I have said, a churlish and frightened return on our part to the frank admission of the oldest continent that it has everything to learn. from the youngest. It is hardly worthy of our achievements or of our spiritual heritage.

Spiritual heritage these words are enough to make the prophets of evil intervene once more. They may admit that a Europeanized Asia will not turn and rend Europe, but they lament over the spiritual loss that will accrue to the world from the adoption by Asia of what the American vision has conceived as 'the lifting of the millions.' They must do so. The picturesque East as it appealed to a Loti, to a Blunt, and to scores of other Western souls in love with beauty so long as it is not of today and therefore cannot offend their scrupulous taste that East spoke of decay and death. Such sentimentalities must be left to their tourist natures; they never moved an Oriental. Yet, though Asia has broken from its moorings and has begun to move its vast bulk over the uncharted seas of progress, seas whereon we have no idea where the Promised Land lies, seas that offer no havens and that are lashed with storms which may destroy the stoutest vessel, one cannot imagine that it will follow tamely in our wake. All we can do is to wish it Godspeed in the great adventure of the modern world, the greatest adventure on which humanity has so far been engaged.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

ON CONFORMING TO THE
TRAFFIC

I HAVE Sometimes wondered why a man
who has just saved his life by dodging
a Ford almost invariably behaves as if
it were a matter of no importance. I do
this myself, so I know by experience
that such a man is probably not so
indifferent as he tries to look. He can
control his expression because his face
goes about naked and is accustomed
to observation; but his knees shake
(in his trousers) and his hair rises
(under his hat). Yet it was only the
other day that I came upon a plau-
sible explanation. Pedestrians, said a
speaker at a Safety First convention
in London, are largely responsible for
motor accidents because they fail to
'conform to the evolution of vehicular
traffic.' So far I have evidently con-
formed; the important question is,
How long can I keep it up? For my
conformity is imperfect, and my as-
sumption of indifference - the manner,
that is, of a man who knows that he
cannot be run over by a Ford ·
is an
instinctive effort to persuade myself
that I already conform very much
better than I do. My evolution would
be arrested if I dropped to my knees
in grateful prayer on the sidewalk;
and so would the evolution of others
if they crowded round to help me up
and congratulate me on having again
dodged a Ford. It will be understood,
of course, that when I say 'Ford' I
mean everything from this fine little
car to the largest imaginable truck.

This is an illuminating discovery, explaining the present by the past and linking together the whole long series

of survivals by which the pedestrian, alive and kicking, has come down into the twentieth century. Millions of years ago I see in imagination my prehistoric ancestor, a coarse, hairy fellow, yet with a certain family resemblance, dodging a dinosaur. If he could have looked millions of years forward, my prehistoric ancestor would have seen me, a refined, hairless fellow, yet with a certain family resemblance, dodging a Ford. I am by no means certain that he would have thought me an improvement. It is not my intention, however, to attempt a parallel between our conditions, which have little in common except the necessity of evading a destructive force and are widely differentiated by the fact that the survival of those hearty, uncultured men millions of years ago did not require also the survival of dinosaurs. As things are with us, every owner and operator of a Ford is often a pedestrian, little as he likes it, and every pedestrian more or less frequently goes about in a Ford.

Observe, for example, my own present condition. I am, as a rule, wholly subservient to the traffic policeman. I Go when he says Go- and I STOP when he says STOP. But, for all my trust in him, I Go more confidently if I can manage unostentatiously to sandwich myself between two good, stout fellow pedestrians. I agree with Cæsar. 'Let me have men about me that are fat,' I say, 'sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights'- or women either, or both together. But the fatter the better. I am almost timid. Yet the other day, far away from a corner and out of sight or reach of any traffic

policeman, I hopped off, as the aviators say, and went across a street in perfect conformity with the vehicular traffic. I was thinking deeply of something else, and, as I now see, my subconscious mind hastily got into uniform and became what is colloquially called a traffic cop. Go! STOP! Go! JUMP! JUMP BACKWARD! STOP! Go! RUN! STOP AND GO! DODGE LEFT! STOP! Go! RUN AROUND IN A CIRCLE! Go! DODGE RIGHT! BACKWARD AND FORWARD! CHANGE STEP! STOP! GO! JUMP! and there I was, safe and sound on the other side of the street. But I relapsed immediately into the self-consciousness of imperfect conformity. My knees shook (in my trousers) and my hair rose (under my hat), though, of course, I assumed the conventional indifference, and went on my way as if nothing unusual had happened, humming or whistling. It is only after I have just dodged a Ford that I hum or whistle in the street.

On the sidewalk the conformity of each unit to the evolution of every other unit is well-nigh perfect. Without giving the matter any conscious thought at all, each drives himself or herself with unerring dexterity, now fast, now slow, deviating by a hair's breadth to pass a thin pedestrian or several inches to pass a fat one, constantly changing his or her course and rate of speed, darting one instant, dawdling, very likely in pleasant conversation, the next; and only on very rare occasions making such an error of judgment as causes one pedestrian to embrace another. Even then no harm is done that cannot be quickly remedied by a merry laugh and an apology - especially to the opposite sex. This, however, has been a long, slow process of evolution, as had been the parallel evolution of vehicular traffic until the invention of a mechanical horse of great speed to which

pedestrians have not yet habituated themselves. It must be also taken into consideration that there are far more mechanical horses in proportion to population; or, to put it colloquially, more Fords than Dobbins.

Hardly more than a century ago Hazlitt wrote in an essay, 'Give me a clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me road before me- and then to thinking! It will be hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder cloud, I plunge into my past being, as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore.' (I am a little puzzled about that Indian, but perhaps he had been out fishing; and anyway, what he plunged off, and why he did it, must have been commonplace compared with Mr. Hazlitt's own dive.) It would appear on this evidence that lone heaths were then available for pedestrians within easy walking distance of large cities, so lone indeed that a pedestrian could laugh, run, leap, and sing without attracting undesirable attention. Occasionally, perhaps, the occupants of a post chaise or a tilbury vehicles with which Mr. Hazlitt was familiar might wonder at his behavior. But nothing faster, or more often, than a bull was likely to approach the traveler from behind; and the winding road in front needed no painted death's-head grinning around each gracious curve to lessen the likelihood of a head-on collision between privately owned and operated locomotives. Often, one may believe, there would be nobody in sight on the lone heath but Mr. Hazlitt himself. We have changed all that; but it was a long time yet before Mr. Ford began making those fine little cars, one of which, if he were alive to-day, Mr. Hazlitt would very likely own and

operate. There will be those to say that if he still insisted upon walking he might join the Boy Scouts. But this expedient would give no satisfaction to Mr. Hazlitt. 'One of the pleasantest things in the world,' he wrote, 'is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.'

It is not surprising, therefore, that the pedestrian is still a nonconformist to the evolution of vehicular traffic; but it may fairly be argued that his evolution lags in part because of the very efforts being made to protect him from the consequences of his nonconformity. Nothing is more erroneous than the idea, frequently advanced by pedestrians, that motorists are indifferent to the safety of pedestrians -except, perhaps, the equally silly notion, frequently advanced by motorists, that pedestrians are indifferent to the safety of motorists. The frank statement at the Safety First convention that pedestrians are really responsible for being run over went hand in hand with further efforts to keep them from being run over. But the protection of pedestrians is not the way that nature would conduct matters. Crossing the street in a reasonably confident state of mind, yet a shade apprehensive lest the vehicular traffic start with a rush before the last pedestrian is quite over, - and this, I imagine, is how the last forty or fifty of the Israelites felt when they crossed the Red Sea, does not advance the evolution of the pedestrian as a free walker in an overpopulated world. It tends, if anything, to make a sheep of him. But even if pedestrians conformed to traffic there would be pride and place for the traffic policeman. It would be all right, as I have just shown, for one pedestrian to cross by himself, but several hundred pedestrians at once would take up too much space. So there would still be

need of the graceful gestures of a handsome man in uniform, or the pretty flashing of colored lights in a tower, to tell these pedestrians when to Go and when to STOP. But the pedestrians would respond better. They would Go, and they would STOP, and none would STOP when they were told to Go or Go when they were told to STOP. The time may come when such direction is rendered unnecessary by tunnels, and the pedestrian will run lightly downstairs on one side of the street and lightly upstairs and out on the other; or by bridges, in which case the pedestrian will do just the opposite. That he will ever become a mechanical bird and fly over is, I think, as out of the question as that he will ever become a motor vehicle himself by wearing wheels and a motor; and so, whatever happens, the nonconformist will be in the same danger, out of his tunnel or off his bridge, that he is now in when out of sight of a traffic policeman.

Fortunately there remain many places that may still relatively be called lone heaths, where natural beauty is now diversified by the introduction of works of art illustrating the life and manners of the times, and where the vehicular traffic is spread so thin that quite often Mr. Hazlitt might for a minute or two have the road all to himself. It is on these lone heaths that the pedestrian may come to know the motor car, as his prehistoric ancestor came to know the dinosaur, through all his senses. Many things on which I pride myself my prehistoric ancestor did not know, but he knew dinosaurs. He knew what they looked like, sounded like, smelled like, tasted like, fortunately our present situation is not complicated by the palatability of a Ford, and, either by hearsay or by experience, felt like. He and this I cannot do even was quick

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'You are a doctor?' inquired the person in the pear-shaped hat.

The interrogation lacked the embroidery of usage. It was simple, direct, of the soil.

The traveler from those fabulous countries which lie a hundred nights' lodging from the village answered: 'No, I am not a doctor.'

'You have a book,' answered the person in the pear-shaped hat.

There was finality in the remark; as if the possession of a book by a person from those wizard regions were indisputable proof of science.

The person in the pear-shaped hat said: 'We are burying a man over there. Yesterday his wife fled from his house and he became ashamed. He became ashamed, so that he ate opium. So much opium that his heart stopped beating. Is he dead? Is he not dead? We are not sure. But we think that he is dead. And it is our custom that if a man die he must be buried at once. So we are burying him. But we are not sure. You, who are a doctor — '

The traveler said: 'No, I am not a doctor.'

The person in the pear-shaped hat turned away. He rejoined his companions. Then two from among them stooped and lifted from the ground by each end a long narrow object, wrapped in white cloth. The bundle was tied at both extremities with string, but from one end protruded two brown feet.

The men laid the bundle carefully in a hole which had been prepared. A third man took up a spade and began to shovel in the earth.

The traveler shuddered. He thought: 'Under that crush of earth, if he is still

'What is the matter?' said the alive, he will never wake. He will traveler.

The person in the pear-shaped hat lifted a thin brown arm, covered from the elbow up in a loose sleeve of blue cotton cloth. He pointed to a space of rising ground across the road from the village. The place was dry and bare except for a score of low, shapeless mounds marked by rough stones from the hillside, set on end. A group of bluecoated villagers stood among the stones and gazed dully at the traveler.

escape in his sleep.' He thought: 'Even if I could snatch him back, who am I to decide that he must return? He has escaped the torture of being ashamed; escaped hunger, disease, extortion. Let him lie.'

The creaking road carriage crawled over the shoulder of the hill. The wretched village, the group of mute, blue-coated villagers, the bare, forbidding place of burial, were blotted out of sight.

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