Take a couple of dusty--or muddy--streets, unroll them along some freshwater stream just above a line of palmed beach: place an immense, deserted-looking softstone church in an unkept square flanked with a few straggled acacias and a big convent in which a native priest lives in weary and squalid detachment from a world he knows nothing about: line the two streets with an assortment of rusty bamboo and mixed-material houses which impress one as never having been built but as always having stood there: sprinkle a few naked, pot-bellied, brown children staring at each other in pathetic, Malay ignorance of the manner and spirit of play: set a few brown manikins in the open windows--women who let life fly by in dull wonder of what it is all about: add a few carabaos lying in neck-deep content in mudwallows, and a score of emaciated curs which snarl at each other in habitual, gnawing hunger and which greet their masters with terrified whines: spread over it all a pall of still moist heat and a sky arched by a molten sun. Contrive all this, then imbue every object--human and creature, animate and inanimate,--with an air of hopelessness, of the futility of effort, and you will have a typical Malay town as the Americans found them. But not so where the American has set his impious foot--impious of the dogma that you can not change the East, nor hurry it. He enjoyed the finesse of the phrase, quoted it, then jumped in to hustle the East. The old timers,--Spaniards and Britishers for the greater part--shrugged at each other over their heavy tiffins and nine o'clock dinners; these crazy Americans would soon learn! But the crazy, enthusiastic Americans, engineers, health officers, executives, school teachers, Constabulary, labored on in the glory of service: eradicated cholera, built roads and bridges, brought six hundred thousand children into school that two score tribes might find a common tongue, fought the devastating cattle plagues, wiped out brigandage and piracy, brought order and first semblance of prosperity to eight millions of people. Young men did it all. The old-timers suddenly found that they were living in new times, in clean, healthful towns: found that business was increasing by leaps and bounds as the natives fell in behind the young Americans with a quicker stride than Orientals had ever known. And they are the reasons--those few thousands of smooth-faced Americans who laughingly threw themselves at the wall of immemorial sloth and apathy--why Kipling's phrase is seldom quoted east of India, and now not often there. And they are the reasons, those carefully chosen, confident young men of whom too many are buried over there, that we have so much of which to be proud in what has been done in our name for a backward, unfortunate people. But we, you and I, do not know very much about it all: it is so far away and we are so busy with our affairs, our politics, our--