I wanted to find out how high Kilimanjaro was. After a book has been written and rewritten five or six times, rows of figures are apt to do strange things.What with copying and recopying and infinite corrections scribbled all around them, they have a way of playing hide-and-seek with themselves.One moment they are one thing.The next moment they are something else.If you have ever been snow-blind, you will know what I mean.

“But,”you will answer,“that really can't be much of a problem. Look it up in some reliable handbook of geography or in an encyclopedia or in an atlas and copy it.”

That would be very simple if these blessed geographies, encyclopedias and atlases were ever able to agree upon any given fact. But apparently they are not.I have got most of the standard volumes on geography right here on my desk and they are a subject of constant delight.Not that they are particularly amusing reading.Geography is not supposed to be a very amusing subject.But when it comes to doing tricks with mountain tops and oceans they are sublime.River basins and the drainage areas of inland seas stretch and shrink and shrink and stretch.The mean average temperature of any given part of the world never stays mean or average very long but makes the mercury of the different meteorological stations behave like a stock-market ticker during a panic.And the bottom of the ocean heaves and sighs like Noodle's tummy after a particularly exciting chase after a cat.

I don't want to destroy any further illusions in a world that has already lost its faith in so many things. But I come out of this struggle with“the facts of geography”having a profound doubt about all further vital statistics.I suppose that this unfortunate diversity of opinions is the result of our incurable vice of nationalism.Every little country must have a few figures all its own, so as to be really able to manifest its sovereign independence.

But that was merely a detail. There were other problems, of which I shall enumerate a few.One half of the world measures weight and distance according to the decimal system.The other half sticks to the duodecimal system.To revaluate meters and kilometers into yards and miles accurately, not merely approximately, is no easy matter, as the gun manufacturers of the Great War learned to their intense discomfort.However, with the help of a competent mathematical assistant(I am no genius at that sort of thing)the necessary calculations can be made.But how about the proper names of countries and mountains and rivers?How should these be spelled?The Gulf of Chili—Gulf of Tjili—Gulf of Tscbili—Gulf of Tshi-li—take your choice, my friends!Hindu-Kush—Hindoekoesch—Hindu-Kutch—Hindu-Kusj—which one do you prefer?But that would not be so bad if at least the different big language groups had been able to agree upon the proper way of spelling Russian or Chinese or Japanese or Spanish names.But every major tongue has at least two and sometimes three conflicting systems of transcribing these strange tongues into the native vernacular.

To add to this confusion of tongues, every tiny scrap of land that can boast of a dialect of its own now claims full and equal rights for“the sacred language of the ancestors”,and the map of Europe that used to be fairly simple before the war has recently blossomed forth with a multicolored linguistic flora which makes the reading of Mr. Cook's old and reliable“Continental Railroad Guide”a labor only to be compared to the efforts of Champollion while tackling his first half-dozen Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I am not trying to formulate an alibi. What I have writ, I have writ, but please be lenient with some of my heights and depths.When eminent encyclopedias and statistical handbooks contradict themselves three or four times on three or four different pages, what is the.poor amateur going to do?

I suppose in the end he will do what I did. He will call a plague upon all these learned tomes and buy himself a copy of the“World Almanac”and he will say:“I am going to stick to this one book, and if anybody wants to sue me because I have made Kilimanjaro 19,710 feet high(in the Britannica it is 19,321;in Andrews'Geography,19,000;in the Oxford Advanced Atlas,19,320;in the World Almanac,19,710),I shall tell him to go and see the publishers of the World-Telegram, Inc.,and let him fight it out with them.”

But what I was going to say when I started upon this Kilimanjaro—Kiliman'djaro—Kilimantscharo—Kilimansjaro topic was this. I was looking for my World Almanac which had inadvertently hidden itself behind a dozen atlases, and during that search I got hold of a pamphlet that had been sent me a short while before.It was a pamphlet devoted to the life and the work of Sir Ronald Ross.In very polite terms the author hinted that Sir Ronald, if not absolutely in want, was so far removed from affluence that we might do something about making him at least reasonably comfortable during the rest of his days.Of course his needs were not exorbitant.Scientists rarely count their reward in dollars and dimes.But having completely ruined his health in the pursuit of his studies, he could do nicely with a more convenient sort of invalid's chair.

I put the pamphlet aside and thought of our own Walter Reed. I have forgotten what our grateful country has done for his widow.If I remember rightly the good lady was given a“mailing frank”(such as any twelve-in-a-dozen congressman enjoys),and of course she receives the pension that is usually paid to the widows of officers in the Medical Corps, and there is a hospital somewhere called after him.

Well, being in a meditative sort of mood, I looked for a volume on the history of epidemics. And then suddenly I was struck by an idea.These two men, Reed and Ross, of whom no one ever seems to have heard, have done more for the development of this earth than hundreds of explorers whose names are familiar to every child in the lowest grades of our grammar schools.By discovering the cause of malaria and yellow fever and by showing us the way in which the world can be set free of those pestilential afflictions, they have opened up more new territory than we shall be able to develop during the next hundred years.The million-murdering mosquito has at last been called to a hat.Anopheles has been driven into a corner and has been forced to listen to the reading of his own death sentence.

It would be easy to add several pages to this chapter on the“Influence of Medicine upon the Geography of the World”. Small-pox, beri-beri, sleeping sickness and dozens of other ailments have had to be conquered before the greater part of our world could be made fit for man's permanent habitation.But all this is a little outside of my own“field”,so to speak.I know too little about that subject.Nevertheless, the names of those two doctors have set me thinking and wondering.

There is a great deal of unrest in this world. When one looks at the map, one finds little bits of red appearing everywhere.Discontent is breaking out like a severe case of the measles.And books by the ton are being written in an effort to diagnose the case and to suggest suitable remedies.I had never thought very much about it(an author leads such a sheltered life)until I came to write this book.Then suddenly the whole problem became so very simple and Ross and Reed were responsible.

Day-dreaming over a map is really a very pleasant and instructive pastime. There lies Rhodesia—a whole world by itself.Cecil Rhodes was a promoter.He made a few people rich.He killed a great many natives.He turned brigand and started a little war of his own and lost.He turned statesman and started a big war and won.There are a great many monuments to murdered women and children which could bear the legend:“C.R.sculpsit”,but a grateful country overlooked these trifles and called a vast new province after him.

A little further northward lies the Congo with its Stanleyvilles and Leopoldvilles and the unmarked graves of countless natives tortured to death because they were behind on their rubber quota or slow in bringing in elephant tusks.

Hudson gave his name to a bay which in turn bestowed its name upon a rich land company. What that land company did to the original inhabitants makes another terrible chapter in the sad volume devoted to the Martyrdom of Man.But we need not go so far abroad.We ourselves have never yet kept a single treaty with our Indians.What my own ancestors did unto the brown men of those far away spice islands which they conquered three hundred years ago is usually not taught in the public schools of Holland and it is perhaps just as well.What happened in the Putomayo region of South America is still in everybody's memory.

The crimes the different native potentates of Africa and the Arab slave-dealers committed in the silent Senegambian forests make us wish that Dante had reserved a special department of his Inferno for monsters of that particular variety.

The man-hunts with horses and dogs, organized to exterminate the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are rarely mentioned in the histories devoted to the early years of these distant territories.

Why go on?

I am merely repeating what everybody already knows.

But what few people seem to realize is that the Great Era of Exploitation has definitely come to an end, that most of the present unrest is due to the unwillingness of the former victims to play that role any longer.

There is very little use in sitting in high judgment upon the Errors of the Past. It is more profitable to collect our thoughts and devise ways and means by which we shall be able to avoid a few of the mistakes of the future.Well, the men and women of the type of Reed and Ross are there to show us the way.

Sentimental meditations upon the glories of a problematic Utopia will get us nowhere. To say that since we have spent dozens of centuries“taking away”we must now spend other dozens of centuries“giving”will hardly solve the problem.Charity is as bad as brigandage.Charity is really just as unfair to the recipient as to the donor.To set the Indian native free from the tyranny of the English Raj and then leave him undefended to the mercy of the Moslem mountaineers would be merely another blunder.

Nor would it benefit the Chinese or the Japanese or the Burmese if we should suddenly pack up all our little railroads and flivvers and flying machines and remove our telephone booths and our filling stations and bid them go back to the blessings of the Gandhi's loin-cloth and the crocodile-gnawed sampan. The machine has come to stay.The natives have adapted their lives to fast means of transportation and communication.They have fallen into the habit of calling on the white man's doctor when the child develops diphtheria rather than send grandmother to the voodoo priest.When they want to visit their friends, they prefer a jitney-bus to a ten-hour walk across a painful track.

And a world accustomed to money and to bank-notes is not going back to the pails of honey and the spoonfuls of salt and all the other clumsy trivialities of the ancient system of barter.

For better or worse, this planet of ours has become one large, going concern, and the date over the doorway is 1932,not 932 or 32 B. C.

There is, however, a solution, and the labors of Reed and Ross show us the general direction of the road we shall have to follow. For these two men neither“took”nor“gave”—they“cooperated”.They could never have done what they did without the assistance of thousands of others.Neither did they stamp out malaria and yellow fever for the exclusive benefit of the black man or the white man or the yellow man.Without regard to color or creed they bestowed their blessings upon the whole of humanity.When Goethals and Dr.Gorgas dug the Panama Canal(Goethals drew the blue prints and Gorgas gave him the man-power with which to translate his drawings into cubic feet of excavated rock)they were not thinking of either the Pacific or the Atlantic alone, nor of America alone, but of the world as a whole.When Marconi invented his wireless, he did not stipulate,“Only Italian ships must be allowed to use the radio in case of disaster”.The Zanzibar tramp was benefited as much as the fastest trans-Atlantic greyhound.

You probably see what I am driving at.

No, I am not going to suggest the formation of a new society. That is not necessary.The problem will take care of itself.If it does not, there won't be any problem in a couple of centuries because there won't be any people left to worry about it.

We no longer live in a world the future of which we can leave to itself. That policy went out when steam and electricity came in and when Patagonia and Lapland, Boston and Han-kow became neighbors, able to confer with each other in less than two minutes.We are no longer manufacturing goods for ourselves alone or raising grain for the home village.Japan can make our matches cheaper than we can ever hope to do and the Argentine can grow enough wheat to keep the whole of Germany from starving and at much smaller cost.

We no longer can offer the Chinese Coolie or the Rand Kaffir one-twentieth of the wages we would pay a white man, because Moscow has a broadcasting station that carries very far and a staff of polyglot announcers who inform the black and the yellow man that he is being cheated out of something that really belongs to him.

We are no longer able to plunder and filch and rob as heartily as our fathers did because—well, if you really want to know—because our conscience won't let us or if we ourselves should have happened to be born without that spiritual compass, because the collective conscience of mankind has at last reached the point where it is beginning to get a first flickering suspicion that honesty and common decency are as inevitable in international affairs as they are in those of private citizens.

No, I am not going to preach a sermon. I am not going to send you home with a“message”.But if you have read this far, I would like to ask you to sit quite still for another half hour and draw your own conclusions.

Thus far we have always lived as if we were a sort of accident—as if our stay on this planet was only a matter of years or at best of centuries. We have behaved with the indecent greed of passengers on a passenger-train who know that they will only have ten minutes for the three-course dinner to be served at the next halting-place.

Gradually we are beginning to realize that we not only have been here quite a long time but that we are going to stay here almost indefinitely. Why the hurry and why the rush?When you move to a town where you expect to spend the rest of your days, you plan for the future.So do your neighbors, the butchers and bakers and grocers and the doctors and undertakers.If they didn't, the whole place would be in such hopeless disorder that it would be uninhabitable in less than a week's time.

When you come to think of it, is there really such a very great difference between the world at large and your own native village?If there is any difference, it is one of quantity rather than quality. And that is all!

You will say that I have wandered all over the place, from Kilimanjaro by way of Dr. Reed and Dr.Ross to planetary planning for the future.

“But What,”as Alice might have asked,“is the use of a Geography without a little Travelling?”

Paris, April,1931

New Orleans, May,1932