and Raymond B. Fosdick have generously testified to the value of this coöperation.

It appears that the United States Government has been represented in the League Committees on Health, Anthrax, Opium, Customs Formalities, Communications and Transit, Traffic in Arms, and the Trade in Women and Children.

Furthermore, individual Americans have rendered important services to the League in various capacities. Among these should be mentioned the names of Abram Elkus, chairman of the commission appointed by the League in the Aaland Islands dispute; of Elihu Root, the most influential member of the Commission of Jurists that drafted the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice; of Norman Davis, chairman of the League's commission which settled the differences between Poland and Lithuania concerning the Memel district; of Henry Morgenthau, chairman of the League's Committee of Control in connection with the international loan to Greece to take care of its many refugees; and of Jeremiah Smith, High Commissioner for the League in the financial rehabilitation of Hungary. The achievements of General Dawes and of Messrs. Young and Robinson in the solution of the reparations problem are particularly deserving of consideration. Further evidence is not needed to demonstrate that the American people and their Government are thoroughly alive to all that makes for human brotherhood and for world welfare. The family of nations is too intimately interrelated to permit of a policy of selfish isolation even if we so desired. There is no such isolation on the part of the United States. The issue is narrowed down simply to the question of the wisdom of maintaining our traditional foreign policy.

Our survey of the international situation would seem to indicate that the greatest service we can render to the cause of human brotherhood and world peace is to reaffirm our policy of independence and non-participation in the political concerns of Europe.

We cannot afford to become implicated in the decision of European political questions either for domestic or for international Our nation is unique in being a great gathering place of the peoples of all lands. It is an international forum in itself. The

reasons.

election of a Senator or of a Representative must not be allowed to depend on what our Government may think of the merits of Italy's claims to Fiume, or of the French occupation of the Ruhr. In the difficult process of fusing the various races in our midst we cannot invite disruptive discussions concerning the official attitude of the United States in the many intricate political situations constantly arising in Europe.

We have our own domestic problems to settle. We have our own "regional understandings" to be negotiated and put into practical operation with the other nations of this hemisphere. We literally have our own business to mind. It is a solemn trust which we fail adequately to meet. We cannot permit European nations either through the League of Nations or by other means to intervene in the carrying out of this trust.

The larger aspect of this policy of political detachment is seen to best advantage in the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armament. The results there attained may not prove to be as important as we may have hoped. The Conference, however, illustrates most effectively the strength of the American policy. Without the constraints of a formal organization where embarrassing issues may be unexpectedly raised and national susceptibilities affronted, we are free to invite other nations at any moment to join in the consideration of specific difficulties affecting world peace. This may be done in such a way that without any suggestion of coercion, moral or otherwise, nations may come together to discuss such matters as they may desire to discuss and are eager to adjust.

While the League of Nations is wrestling with the problem of disarmament, the United States may be in a favored position, as intimated by President Coolidge, to take the initiative at the right moment in summoning an international conference to deal with that thorny problem in a manner that will not awaken the distrust or hostility of peoples eager to lessen the burden of armaments but also determined to safeguard legitimate national interests. They evidently view with great confidence the political detachment of the United States with respect to such interests and controversies.

Norman Davis, in his interesting account of his part in the

work of the commission of the League of Nations concerning Memel, asserts that his ability to negotiate a settlement of this controversy was largely due to the fact that he was an American, and that it would have been difficult for the League to settle it "without being able to enlist the services of an American or persons from influential nations not directly concerned in the controversy. Of course, an American appointed officially by the United States would have had more influence. Leaving aside the question as to the permanent value of the settlement approved by Mr. Davis and by the League in this instance, it is difficult to see much logic in his assertion that his influence as an impartial mediator and arbitrator would have been enhanced had he been officially designated by the United States. On the contrary, if the United States as a member of the League had been drawn into a discussion of this whole painful controversy between Poland and Lithuania, or of such a distressing crisis as arose over the bombardment of Corfu by Italian warships, its mediating influence, either directly or indirectly through one of its distinguished citizens, would have been considerably weakened. Are not such men as Norman Davis, Elihu Root, and Jeremiah Smith immediately available and deserving of special confidence because of the very fact that they are citizens of a nation enjoying a complete detachment from the political controversies of Europe? We appear to possess internationally a position of signal advantage. We have a sacred responsibility. The other nations of the world in the midst of their traditional prejudices, their rival interests, and bitter dissensions must be able to count confidently on the friendliness and the dispassionate sense of justice of this country. There must remain at least one great nation aloof from European intrigues and disputes to serve, not as the schoolmaster, the preacher, the policeman, or the court of final appeal, but in the lofty rôle of the friend of all. The cause of world justice and of world peace demands that in the face of misunderstanding, calumny, and clamor, we remain faithful to those American ideals which are eventually to prove the salvation of all free peoples.

PHILIP MARSHALL BROWN.

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE AMERICAS

BY BAILEY K. ASHFORD, M. D.

Colonel in the Medical Corps, U. S. A.

An arrangement has been made between Columbia University and the Insular Government of Porto Rico by which, with the Institute of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene of the island as a nucleus, a School of Tropical Medicine will be founded in San Juan, Porto Rico, under the administration and with the participation of Columbia University. This School will open for students on November 1, 1924, and its first session will be centred at the Institute pending the erection of buildings and a large hospital. At present the United States has no institution of this kind in the tropics, although some excellent schools of tropical medicine are affiliated with northern universities. This insular school will endeavor, not to compete with these, but, on the contrary, to furnish clinical material on a large scale and demonstrate the actual working out of tropical sanitation to extend further the work of northern schools, all in the atmosphere of a typical tropical country under the American flag.

Despite a remarkably low mortality for hot climates, Porto Rico possesses a profusion of diseases peculiar to all tropical countries to which an American would be likely to go. Here uncinariasis (hookworm disease), sprue, malaria, filariasis, a variety of fungoid skin diseases, and the interesting nutritional and deficiency problems of the tropics abound, and yaws, blackwater fever, schistosomiasis, dengue, and other affections peculiar to these latitudes can be easily demonstrated. The island is rich in small hospitals, dispensaries and laboratories. Its Health Department, presided over by an energetic young Porto Rican who is a graduate of an American medical school and also an ex-officio member of the Institute, presents a remarkable opportunity for the study of a model centralized sanitary service with laboratories, an anti-plague rat service, tropical tuberculosis service,

and a leper settlement. Here also is an important station of the Federal Public Health Service with its Quarantine Station and all of the machinery for preventing the introduction of communicable diseases from without. Here are two branches of the International Health Board (Rockefeller Foundation), one working on hookworm disease, another on malaria. Finally, toward the end of the course there will be a medical expedition to the mountainous interior, where a month will be spent in studying the prevalent diseases of the agricultural laborer at close range, from the view point of field clinical and laboratory work.

This school is a response to an urgent demand for greater familiarity, not only with academic tropical medicine, but with the normal living conditions of the tropics and the contact with the sick by which may be acquired the necessary familiarity with clinical tropical medicine. The demand for such a centre can be understood when we bethink ourselves of the large tropical and subtropical estates managed by Americans, in which the prevention of disease and its treatment among laborers play a leading hand in the ultimate success of great business enterprises such as occurred in the building of the Panama Canal.

When the Pilgrim Fathers first landed from the Mayflower, the city of San Juan de Puerto Rico was entering upon its second century of existence. It was over a hundred years old when Jamestown was first settled and Hudson made his maiden trip up the river which bears his name. It had buildings and fortifications which are still standing and, some of them, still in use, when St. Augustine, Florida was settled.

If a map of the United States should show its component parts in shades of red, deepening with the density of population, Porto Rico would shine as a garnet. Were deepening shades of blue to denote the degree of culture of the literates, the island would be quite blue enough to satisfy the most exacting.

For this is an old civilization. There are 1,299,809 inhabitants living in 3,435 square miles of territory, or 378.5 persons to the square mile. While 55 per cent. of the population is illiterate, when the island became American, only a quarter of a century ago, this illiteracy was at least 77 per cent. The eagerness of the people of Porto Rico to prepare their youth for the intelligent use