New York, New Orleans, Vera Cruz, and Galveston; from 3,000 to 3,600 miles from Rio Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Cadiz, and the nearest point of the African continent (Cape Verde). It is only about 650 miles from Kingston, Jamaica, and Caracas, Venezuela. It lies just across the Mona Passage from Santo Domingo, and is the central link in the Antillean chain of islands where Europe first planted her several flags, where her trade with America first flourished, where rival European States in their respective islands fought desperately at close range, and where the feudal system evoked the first cry for American liberty in the deeds of the Buc

caneers.

If one picks up a map of the Western World and gives it a mere glance, Porto Rico can be seen to be ideally situated, not only as a commercial distributing depot for North and South America, but as a gathering place for the best minds of both continents under tropical conditions. To the American from the United States seeking special knowledge of Latin America, the language, customs and living conditions can be learned under the best conditions and with the highest degree of profit. Certainly educated Porto Ricans come nearer than any other population in Latin America to being bilingual. In this densely populated country, under American institutions, but still preserving the best of Latin America, the breaking-in process will be gentle and most agreeable, and the application of American ideals to tropical conditions can be most readily realized.

On the other hand, the citizen of one of the South or Central American republics will be able to live as he would at home, speaking his own language and at the same time absorbing the essence of American thought in the United States direct from its representative men. To him, also, the breaking-in process would be gentle. He obtains the point of view of the Northern land in circumstances to which he is accustomed, and brings the genius of his race to broaden our American life in these Southern countries.

Thus, there is much to recommend Porto Rico as a meeting place for the minds of the two great civilizations which inhabit the Americas. But there is a special reason for choosing medical science as the basic element in this intellectual entente. There is a reason for selecting Porto Rico, the best reason in the world;

the island has already accomplished something, through the medical sciences, toward the betterment of our Western World. For it was Porto Rico that first focussed attention upon a great scourge of both North and South America; that first, in 1899, announced the nature of the anæmia and physical deterioration of the agricultural laborer of tropical and subtropical America; that first demonstrated the endemic presence of hookworm disease in America, at least north of the equator; that first, in all America, devised and carried out a plan for combating this disease on a large scale. With the persistent financial support and faith of the people of Porto Rico, over 300,000 persons were treated by its official commission for a disease which caused in 1900 the death of 12,000 persons, nearly one-third of the total deaths from all causes.

At the close of that campaign, and in large part due thereto, the mortality of 42 per 1,000 fell to around 21 per 1,000 and has never since materially risen; the efficiency of the laborer, estimated by some two hundred and twenty-five of the island's prominent plantation owners, rose over sixty per cent.; the pale ghosts that by their steady labor had saved their country's commercial life were more and more rapidly transfigured into the image of normal men. Out of this campaign, in 1911, the Institute of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene was founded for the purpose of investigating tropical diseases in the island, and its members, the original group which had carried the anæmia campaign to a successful issue, founded that institution with the solemn determination to cause it to evolve, some day, in some way, into a School of Tropical Medicine.

Through the initiative of several Porto Rico statesmen, a great American university, Columbia, sent a commission to the island to look over the field for the establishment of such a school, and that university has formally decided to administer, with the coöperation of the Insular Government, the first School of Tropical Medicine under the American flag in the tropics. The interest of the island itself in the enterprise has just been attested by the passage, by the Insular Government, of an act appropriating $100,000 for a new School of Medicine building, with a permanent endowment by the Island of $30,000 a year for maintenance.

This is not a dream, an experiment, but a fact, and a fact that meets a great need. England has her schools of tropical medicine, situated in the tropics; so has France; so had Germany; so have other countries. The United States has such schools, but not in the tropics. Laboratories and lectures are of inestimable value, but without clinical material in abundance, without personal contact with the normal life of the tropics, one can hardly expect that the abnormal can be accurately sensed or even well understood.

Of the vital elements missing in all schools of tropical medicine in temperate climates, that is, the actual demonstration of pathologic alongside of normal conditions, and sanitary machinery actually in operation, Porto Rico has an inexhaustible supply. Thus her School of Tropical Medicine will come as a welcome complement to similar schools in northern countries, working, not in competition with them, but in practical extension of their aims and ideals.

The first step has been taken, the cornerstone laid, for what may become a great span in the bridge of comprehension between English-speaking America, on the one hand, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America on the other. But other spans must be built, and here we must leave the realities to scan the future and see one after the other of our great universities of both North and South America making extensions similar to that of Columbia, to group with her in a great Pan-University Confederation, a Pan-American University, a super-university of post-graduate schools, each independent in itself, each representing a separate division of human knowledge; a School of Tropical Agriculture, of Pan-American Commerce, of Tropical Climatology, of Tropical Architecture, of Inter-American Sanitation, of the American languages-the list would be as long as the demand. Such a centre would compete with no one university; it would serve all as an extension. It would not be a National enterprise, a purely governmental institution. It would be a great and spontaneous effort on the part of American higher education to erect a splendid causeway for international progress and international peace. It would be the triumph of all that the University stands for, that is implied in its name. Into this conception, with good

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grace all of our American universities can enter, as well those of North as those of South and Central America. Are other bridges in the building elsewhere? So much the better. There is many a dark gulf to cross before Pan-Americanism becomes something more than a rhetorical expression.

I have tried to outline the plan by which a feasible and necessary extension of our American university life may come in contact with, influence, and be influenced by the university life of the other American republics. It is costly, it may be thought a chimera, but some such movement will come to fill a long-felt need, if the seeds of dissociation, which constantly threaten to take root to our mutual disadvantage, are to be prevented from falling into ground fertilized by reciprocal ignorance.

BAILEY K. ASHFORD.

THE MEXICAN PROBLEM SOLVED

BY GEORGE CYRUS THORPE

"It is a new Mexico that faces the world in pride and confidence," wrote Señor Roberto V. Pesqueira, Confidential Agent of the Government of Mexico, to the American Secretary of State in 1920. "From border to border there is peace. Not a single rebel remains in arms against the Federal Government, and a whole nation thinks in terms of law, order and reconstruction. A first task, of course, is firm and enduring friendship between Mexico and the United States. Our business is to set this friendship on foundations so firm that it cannot be shaken by the attack of reaction. Permit me, therefore, to deal with certain slanders that have not only prejudiced the people of the United States, but which have aroused much bitterness in my own country. Mexico cannot but feel deeply grieved over the charge that she intends or has ever intended to disavow her obligations. President de la Huerta, as well as President-elect Obregon, have on repeated occasions publicly declared that Mexico will respect all rightful claims duly proved as such, submitting herself to the recognized principles of international law. The Mexican Government is prepared to establish a joint arbitration commission to pass upon and adjudicate the claims presented by foreigners on account of damages occasioned during the revolution. Any claim that cannot be adjusted by means of direct negotiations between the claimant and the Mexican Government will be submitted to the consideration of this commission, whose decisions will be deemed final and binding."

These overtures were made, as has been said, in 1920. Yet American-Mexican diplomacy bore little real fruit until President Coolidge's recent proclamation of two conventions signed and ratified in the early part of this year.

At the conclusion of the negotiations of the American-Mexican Commission in Mexico that marked the resumption of Mexican