04 The Endless Parade

Did you ever see a parade—a very long one? I once saw a parade of soldiers that took all day to pass by. Tramp, tramp—tramp, tramp—tramp, tramp, hour after hour, all day long. I never had seen so many men in my whole life. There must have been a hundred thousand of them. It didn't seem possible that there were so many people in the World. But if all the people there are in the World should pass by in one long parade, it would take not one day but a lifetime for them to pass by, for there are over two billion people in the world.

A hundred new people—babies—are born every minute of the day and of the night; many are born while you are reading this, and with every tick of the clock some one has died. But more people are born than die each day, so that the World is getting fuller and fuller of people all the time.

The people on the World are all about the same size and shape. Only in fairy-tales are people as small as your thumb or as tall as a church-steeple. None have wings instead of arms or wheels instead of legs. They all have one head, one nose, one mouth; they all have two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs. And yet in all these two billion people there are no two alike, there is not a single person exactly like any other one. Even twins are not exactly alike.

The chief difference in people is their color. Most of the two billion are white, but a great many are black and a larger number are halfway between white and black—they are sort of yellow-brown. These three colors of people we call “races.”“It's a good day for the race,” my father used to say. I thought he was talking of a horse-race or a boat-race, but when I asked, “What race?” he would smile and say, “It's a good day for the white race, the black race, all the races.”

Each race used to live by itself in its own part of the World, but many have wandered away to other parts. Most of the people in our part of the World are white, but there are also many black and a few yellow-brown.

Suppose you had been born black.

Suppose you'd been born yellow or red.

Suppose you had been born in

Africa or

Asia or

Australia.

Suppo se you had been born with another father and mother.

Suppo se you had been born in another world instead of this World.

Suppo se you hadn't been born at all—where would you be now?

There are only six continents where people live, but on each of these there are several countries. A country doesn't mean the country.A country means cities,towns,villages and country under one ruler. There are eighty countries on the World. Some countries are small with only a few thousand people in the whole country, and some countries are large with many millions of people. Our country, the United States,has over one hundred and fifty million people, but there are several countries with more. China, which is on the other side of the World, has the most people. It has three times as many people as the United States; and India, another country on the other side of the World, has the next largest number of people. Both these countries are in Asia—the largest continent with the shortest name and the most people.

Each country has a ruler, just as every family has a father or every football team has a captain. Some countries have a king for a ruler and some have a president, and most countries have other people to rule with the king and the president.

A king is a king because his father was a king, and his son will be king for the same reason. A president is president because he was chosen by the people in the country, just as the captain of a football team is chosen by his team. Choosing we call “voting.” A king is king for his whole life, but a president is president for only a few years.

The country of a king is called a kingdom. If one man rules over several countries, he is called an emperor and the countries an empire. A country with a president is called a republic. Our country is a republic. The king or the president and the others who rule with him are called the government. The government makes the rules, but it also does two things that no one else is allowed to do. The government makes the money of the country and the postage-stamps. The money of one country is not good in another country and neither are the postage-stamps. And neither is the language of one country good in another—usually.

The people on the World speak many different languages. Even in the same country many different languages are spoken. There are over 3,000 different languages in all—3,000, just think of that! You probably speak only one of these, and couldn't talk to any one nor understand any one who spoke any other language than your own. In the United States almost every one speaks English, which, strange to say, is the language of another country—England. But on a continent like Europe you could hardly go a day's journey without hearing a different language on the street, in the shops, at the hotel.

I happened to be born in the United States, and as I heard everybody around me speaking English I learned to speak English too. But I might have been born in Asia, a yellow boy, and learned to speak Chinese, or I might have been born in Africa, a black boy, and learned to speak a language I don't even know the name of. I know a man who speaks a dozen different languages, and I know of a man who speaks 100! You can understand how wonderful this is when it usually takes years to learn to speak one other language besides your own. Letters of most of these languages are like ours, like the letters on this page—they are called Roman, because a people called Romans first used them long ago. But letters of Chinese and Japanese and some other far-away languages are different—they look like this: