I put the pamphlet aside and thought of our own Walter Reed. I have forgotten what our grateful country has done for his widow. If I remember rightly the good lady was given a “mailing frank” (such as any twelve-in-a-dozen American congressman enjoys) and of course she receives the pension that is usually paid to the widows of officers in the Medical Corps and there is a hospital somewhere called after him.
Well, being in a meditative sort of mood, I looked for a volume on the history of epidemics. And then suddenly I was struck by an idea. These two men, Reed and Ross, did more for the development of this earth than hundreds of explorers whose names are familiar to every schoolboy. By discovering the cause of malaria and yellow fever and by showing us the way in which the world can be set free from those pestilential afflictions they have opened up more new territory than we shall be able to develop during the next hundred years. The million-murdering mosquito has at last been called to a halt Anopheles has been driven into a corner and has been forced to listen to the reading of his own death sentence.
It would be easy to add several pages to this chapter on the “Influence of Medicine upon the Geography of the World”. Smallpox, beri-beri, sleeping sickness and dozens of other ailments have had to be conquered before the greater part of our world could be made fit for man’s permanent habitation. But all this is a little outside my own “field”, so to speak. I know too little about that subject. Nevertheless, the names of those two doctors have set me thinking and wondering.
There is a great deal of unrest in this world. When one looks at the map, one finds little bits of red appearing everywhere. Discontent is breaking out like a severe case of measles. And books by the ton are being written in an effort to diagnose the case and to suggest suitable remedies. I had never thought very much about it (an author leads such a sheltered life) until I came to write this book. Then suddenly the whole problem became so very simple and Ross and Reed were responsible.
Day-dreaming over a map is really a very pleasant and instructive pastime. There lies Rhodesia a whole world by itself. Cecil Rhodes was a promoter. He made a few people rich. He killed a great many natives. He turned brigand and started a little war of his own and lost. He turned statesman and started a big war and won. There are a great many monuments to murdered women and children which could bear the legend: “C.R.sculpsit”, but a grateful country overlooked these trifles and called a vast new province after him.
A little further northward lies the Congo with its Stanleyvilles and Leopoldvilles and the unmarked graves of countless natives tortured to death because they were behind on their rubber quota or slow in bringing in elephant tusks.
Hudson gave his name to a bay which in turn bestowed its name upon a rich land company. What that land company did to the original inhabitants makes another terrible chapter in the sad volume devoted to the Martyrdom of Man. But we need not go so far abroad. We ourselves have never kept a single treaty with the Indians. What my own ancestors did unto the brown men of those far-away spice islands which they conquered three hundred years ago is usually not taught in the public schools of Holland and it is perhaps just as well. What happened in the Putomayo region of South America is still in everybody’s memory.
The crimes the different native potentates of Africa and the Arab slave-dealers committed in the silent Senegambian forests make us wish that Dante had reserved a special compartment in his Inferno for monsters of that particular variety.
The man-hunts with horses and dogs organized to exterminate the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are rarely mentioned in the histories devoted to the early years of these distant continent.
Why go on?
I am merely repeating what everybody already knows.
But what few people seem to realize is that the Great Era of Exploitation has definitely come to an end, that most of the present unrest is due to the unwillingness of the former victims to play that role any longer.
There is very little use in sitting in judgment upon the Errors of the Past. It is more profitable to collect our thoughts and devise ways and means by which we shall be able to avoid a few of the mistakes of the future. Well, the men and women of the type of Reed and Ross are there to show us the way.
Sentimental meditations upon the glories of a problematic Utopia will get us nowhere. To say that since we have spent dozens of centuries “taking away” we must now spend other dozens of centuries “giving” will hardly solve the problem. Charity is as bad as brigandage. Charity is really just as unfair to the recipient as to the donor. To set the Indian native free from the English Raj and then leave him undefended to the mercy of the Moslem mountaineers would be merely another blunder.
Nor would it benefit the Chinese or the Japanese or the Burmese if we should suddenly pack up all our little railroads and flivvers and flying machines and remove our telephone booths and our filling stations and bid them go back to the blessings of Gandhi’s loin-cloth and the crocodile-gnawed sampan. The machine has come to stay. The natives have adapted their lives to fast means of transportation and communication. They have fallen into the habit of calling on the white man’s doctor when the child develops diphtheria rather than send grandmother to the voodoo priest. When they want to visit their friends, they prefer a jitney-bus to a ten-hour walk across a painful track.