The North Americans are not travelers. Few of us do go anywhere, and fewer still know how to travel successfully. The poorest traveler in the world is the society tourist who goes about trying to reproduce home conditions in a foreign land. So far as possible he escapes the life and message of the country in which he sojourns and returns with little else but tales of social functions, a la American, and comparative accounts of expenses at tourist hotels. From the first day out he isolates and fortifies himself against the very things that travel alone can give. He brings home a few trinkets made to sell, some cocksure criticisms of customs, people, and missionaries, and a swelled head. But he has been abroad--save the mark! Travel is a specific for provincialism, but it must be real travel and not imitation home-swagger. Intelligent and sympathetic travel breaks up the hardening strata of thought, pushes back the narrowing horizon, loosens the set fibers of the soul, and is the surest cure yet known for mental arterial sclerosis. The right kind of travel shifts the viewpoint, readjusts life forces, and shakes up the provincialism of the man with the "township horizon." And when the disturbed atoms of character reassemble it is in a different mode and with a new cycle. It is to be said that the South American has not taken much interest in us. Since he has made out to get along without us, he cannot be very important. The Oriental has shown some desire to move into our basement, or at least the woodshed or the washhouse, and we have discovered him. The European has shown his good taste by coming over and moving right in with us, and in time we cannot distinguish him from ourselves. But the South American has gone his way, and in the main has minded his own affairs, and therefore cannot amount to much. If he were a social problem, we would know him better. If he had a penchant for the police force or an itch for office among us, we would cultivate his acquaintance, and perhaps invite him to call. During the past two decades the once despised Chinese have become popular among us. Their utter difference from ourselves, their solid human qualities, their marvelous vitality, their commercial solidarity, their response to the stimuli of the modern world, their astonishing versatility, their wonderful national history--these and a hundred other things stir our imagination, and we have rather suddenly discovered that we like the Chinese--especially at a distance.