people were obliged to take an interest in that publication and in the fate of its publisher.

Judge Gaynor has expressed himself frequently in opposition to this police policy of the suppression of free speech. In an address delivered before the Harvard Political Club some years ago he said:

It is the worst policy in the world to drive people to secret meetings and plottings. Let them speak in the open and you will have no secret plottings, throwing of bombs, and assassinations. It is hard to make the little "pin-head" in authority understand this in this free country, where of all the world it should be understood. He prefers the Russian method of force.

As I write, thousands of girls and young women, formerly employed in the shirt-waist business, are on strike to try to get living wages for their work. The law says that they have the right to use peaceable persuasion to induce others not to take their places. The Penal Code and all the decisions of the New York courts are on the side of "picketing,". if it is not accompanied by force. Yet the

daily papers are full of police outrages upon that right. The police authorities have decided that peaceable persuasion, one of the expressions of the common right of free speech, cannot be used by these poor women in their struggle for living wages. The successor of Mayor 'McClellan is not likely to be so indifferent to similar conduct of the police on such occasions.

One of the decisions of Judge Gaynor which deserves mention under the subject of this article is the Hochstim case. Hochstim had been convicted and sentenced in a New York City criminal court, and an application was made to Judge Gaynor for a certificate of reasonable doubt, which he granted, thereby preventing Hochstim's incarceration in jail pending an appeal. No case could be much more important than this Hochstim case. It directly involved the freedom of elections. Hochstim had been arrested and convicted "for interfering with an election officer in the discharge of his duties." He had taken part in a

small riot in an election booth in the election of 1901. It arose as follows: A duly registered voter had presented himself at the polls, and when in the act of casting his ballot was arrested, for the purpose of preventing him from voting. An election deputy had assumed to decide, on his own responsibility, without recourse to any court or magistrate, without any evidence that the crime of false registering had been committed, that this man was not entitled to vote. Judge Gaynor decided that the election officers never had any such power and that their interference with elections by such arrests was mere lawlessness, and justified resistance. His decision was indorsed and sustained by a higher court to which Hochstim's appeal was taken and which reversed his conviction. The effect upon freedom of election which a contrary decision would have had must be apparent even to the most thoughtless, and yet the Hochstim case was used as a campaign argument against Judge Gaynor; declarations being frequently made in the public press that he had protected from punishment a notorious Lexow character, an East Side politician convicted of crime.

It is true that these various opinions of the Judge who is to be our next Mayor are necessarily incomplete as indications of the course which in his new office he will take in dealing with the difficult problems of police administration in America's greatest city. They are inconclusive because they are of necessity negative rather than positive. They deal with what the police shall not do, rather than what they shall do in performing their most important civic functions. The police themselves, not only the lower in rank but the chiefs and commissioners, are accustomed to assert that it is impossible to stamp out vice and to detect and punish crime by following the ancient machinery of the criminal law and by observing the limitations which it prescribes for the protection of the rights of the innocent; that an aggressive campaign against the forces of evil cannot be waged within the confines of the Constitution. We shall see.

T was good to land at Colon and see

I'

some workaday Americans. For a week I had been aboard an English ship, and, after the formal white ducks of the officers and the careful dressing of the English tourists, it was a joy to see men in flannel shirts and khaki, mud up to their knees, grime on their hands, sweat on their brow-men who were working like galley slaves in a poisonous climate, digging the biggest ditch on earth, and proud of it.

Colon is a nondescript sort of place; there are docks and railway yards and Chinese lotteries and Spanish restaurants and an "Astor House" which reminds one much more of Roaring Camp than of Broadway. There are many mining towns near the Mexican border which one might well mistake for Colon.

One of the Panama Railway steamers had come in during the morning, bringing mail and newspapers from home and a number of the Canal employees back from their leave in "the States." One of them attracted my attention; he was standing on the railway platform among a group in khaki who had come down from their work to welcome him back. They were asking him endless questions about "God's country" and making much sport of his "store clothes," and especially of some Nile-green socks. He pulled up his trousers and strutted about pretending to be vastly

proud of them, but it was easy to see that he was keen to be back in his work clothes. Their "joshing" was a bit rough, but good-natured. For they are a free-andeasy lot, these modern frontiersmen of ours, undismayed by the odds against them.

The Panama Railway is our first experiment in Government ownership; and, as it is always enjoyable to see something accomplished which people have for a long time thought impossible, it was a pleasure to see what a thoroughly good railway it is.

An old college friend met me at the dock, and, after we had looked over the railway, took me out to his quarters. The boundary of the Canal Zone runs through the city of Colon, and the American side of the line is called Christobel. Many of the houses were built by the old French company, but the camp has grown, since the American occupation, to a population of 35,000. All those who work for the Canal Commission are given quarters free of charge; and they are very good quarters. Some of the bachelors have single rooms, sometimes two have a double room together. There are broad, shaded porches about all the American buildings, and every living-place is guarded with mosquito gauze. The quarters are allotted on a regular scale of so many square feet of floor space to every hun

dred dollars of salary. The employees are infinitely more comfortable than in any other construction camp I have ever seen. The furniture is ample: tables and Morris chairs and comfortable beds. Everything There are abunis wonderfully clean. dant baths for every one, and of course the sanitary arrangements are perfect. The bachelor quarters would compare favorably with the ordinary college dormitory.

We did not have time to inspect any of the married men's quarters before our train left for Panama, but my friend tells me that they are even more pleasant than his. Two minutes out from Christobe! the train jumps into the jungle. And this jungle is one of the things which defeated de Lesseps. The engineering problems which face us are practically the same as those which the French tackled; of course we have better machinery and more money. But one of our greatest advantages is W. C. Gorgas, chief sani' tary officer of the Canal Zone.

He

is the army doctor who cleaned up Havana. He had a much harder job on the Isthmus. Even to the layman who knows no more than I of anopheles and stegomyia, the excessively heavy vegetation of the jungle looks threateningly sinister. It is Colonel Gorgas who has pulled its teeth. My friend tells me that there has not been a case of yellow fever on the Zone for three and a half years. And to-day there are only a quarter as many men in the hospital with the dreaded Chagres fever as there were in 1906. The health statistics of the Zone now compare favorably with those of any of our home cities.

There was a motley crowd on our train. In the second-class carriage there were merry West Indian negroes, sullen Spanish and light-hearted Italian laborers. I noticed especially a seat full of Martinique women-their gaudy, elaborate turbans would mark them anywhere. Close beside them were some East Indian coolies-men with Caucasian features and

ebony skin. They all wear queer little embroidered caps; it is all that is left of their native costume. The faces of some of them are remarkably fine and intellectual. There was also a fair sprinkling of Chinese.

Most noticeable in my carriage was a group of Panamanian women, darker skinned than the women of Spain, but still keeping many characteristics of the mother land. My friend called them 'spiggoty women, and then told me that "spiggoty" is Zone slang for anything native, because in the early days the Panamanians, when addressed, used to reply, "No spiggoty Inglis."

Most of the first-class passengers, however, were Americans. Some were evidently of the Administration-their soft hands and clean clothes marked them. And I imagine that they are rather looked down upon by the "men on the line," the civil and mechanical engineers, who swagger about, plainly proud of the marks of toil. And there are women too-cleancut American girls, just such as you would see on a train leading into a co-education college town.

"Gatun !" the conductor calls.

Gatun and Culebra are, I suppose, the two Isthmian names most known in the States. My friend pointed out to me the toes of the great dam. But it isn't a dam they are building; it is a mountain range. It is to be a quarter of a mile wide and a mile and a half long, high enough to hold the water up to a level of eighty-five feet above the sea. They have barely commenced work on this great wall, but it already presents a suggestion of its future massiveness which makes the newspaper sensations about its inadequacy a joke. How could a wall fifteen times as wide as it is high fall over? There are some chronic critics who say that the water will leak through it. But this dam is only a part of the wall of hills which will hold in the great lake. And why this specially prepared hill should be more porous than the others, which nature has thrown together haphazard, is more than I can see.

From Gatun the train goes through territory which is to be the lake. For twenty-three miles the ships will cross this artificial lake to Culebra Cut. Never before has man dreamed of taking such liberties with nature, of making such sweeping changes in the geographical formation of a country. Here are we Americans dropping down into the heart of a jungle of unequaled denseness, building a young

mountain, balancing a lake of 150 odd square miles on the top of the continental divide, gouging out a cañon 10 miles long, 300 feet wide, and in some places over 250 feet deep. Sit back and think about that for a minute and then be proud that you are an American.

All the technical things my friend told me about millions of yards of subaqueous excavation, and so forth, meant nothing to me. But looking out of the car window mile after mile as we passed through what is soon to be the bed of this artificial lake, I caught some faint idea of the magnitude of the project.

Look," my friend cried suddenly. "See that machine-it looks like a steam crane-it is a track-shifter. Invented by one of our engineers. You see, on the dumps, where we throw out the spoil from the cuts, we have to keep shifting the tracks to keep the top of the dump level. Well, it took an awful lot of time to do it by hand. So we developed that machine. It just takes hold of a section of track, rails and ties and all, hoists it up out of its ballast, and swings it over to where we want it. Does in an hour what a gang of twenty men could not do in a week. They're not used much anywhere else in the world. You see, there isn't any other place where they have to shift track on so large a scale."

conceived and are executing this gigantic thing.

The whistle blew in the shops at Gorgona as we pulled into the station, and there was a rush for places in the train. Four men just from their work tumbled into the double seat before me. Fine fellows they were, despite the yellow malarial tinge of their skin and the grimy sweat which ran in little rivulets down their sooty faces. The hands with which they brushed off the beads of perspiration were black and greasy from their work. They wore no coats, and their shirts, wringing wet, stuck close to their backs, and the play of their muscles as they relaxed after the day's strain showed as plainly as if they had been nude. I tried to follow their conversation-which was very earnest-but could not, as it was all about some new four-cylinder engine with a mysterious kind of alternate action.

A few miles farther down the line we came to Empire. The scene on the platform recalled a suburban station on some line out of New York, for, except for a few Chinamen and Spaniards, the crowd was just the same as that which comes down to meet the commuters on an evening train after the work-day is over. One group caught my attention. A young mother of thirty, in the crispest, whitest

"And this is Gorgona," he said, a minute later. "Those shops over there are the largest of their kind in the world— repairing machinery. We can mend anything in there from a locomotive to a watch-spring."

One gets tired of this "largest in the world" talk. But it is only as you accustom yourself to the idea that each integral part of the work is of unequaled proportions that you begin to sense the grandeur of the whole undertaking. The largest dam, the highest locks, the greatest artificial lake, the deepest cut, the biggest machine shops, the heaviest consumption of dynamite, the most wonderful sanitary system-all these and others which I forget are unique-the top point of human. achievement. After an hour of this talk I gained a new respect for Uncle Sam a new respect for his children who have

stood a sister, like a Gibson summer girl. The younger woman held by the hand a little lad of four with Jeanne d'Arc hair, bare legs, a white Russian tunic, and a black belt. Fresh from the bath-tub they looked, all four of them. And while I was admiring the picture they made and wondering at the strange chance which had brought such a New Jersey group down here under the equator the mother's face lighted up and she waved her hand. Two of those grimy, men who had sat before me swung off the steps of the car and came towards them. One was the father. Holding his hands stiffly behind him so as not to soil anything, he bent forward and kissed his wife. Then, one after the other, the children were held up to him for a kiss. The other man, somewhat younger, took off his battered hat with a gallant sweep to the sister. He greeted her as formally as if it had been