“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
    For ever doth accompany mankind
    Hath looked on no religion scornfully
        That men did ever find.

    Which has not taught weak wills how much they can? 
    Which has not fall’n in the dry heart like rain? 
    Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,
        Thou must be born again.”

“The Light of Asia,” by Edwin Arnold, came out at this time and gave me greater delight than any similar poetical work I had recently read.  I had just been in India and the book took me there again.  My appreciation of it reached the author’s ears and later having made his acquaintance in London, he presented me with the original manuscript of the book.  It is one of my most precious treasures.  Every person who can, even at a sacrifice, make the voyage around the world should do so.  All other travel compared to it seems incomplete, gives us merely vague impressions of parts of the whole.  When the circle has been completed, you feel on your return that you have seen (of course only in the mass) all there is to be seen.  The parts fit into one symmetrical whole and you see humanity wherever it is placed working out a destiny tending to one definite end.

The world traveler who gives careful study to the bibles of the various religions of the East will be well repaid.  The conclusion reached will be that the inhabitants of each country consider their own religion the best of all.  They rejoice that their lot has been cast where it is, and are disposed to pity the less fortunate condemned to live beyond their sacred limits.  The masses of all nations are usually happy, each mass certain that: 

    “East or West
    Home is best.”

Two illustrations of this from our “Round the World” trip may be noted: 

Visiting the tapioca workers in the woods near Singapore, we found them busily engaged, the children running about stark naked, the parents clothed in the usual loose rags.  Our party attracted great attention.  We asked our guide to tell the people that we came from a country where the water in such a pond as that before us would become solid at this season of the year and we could walk upon it and that sometimes it would be so hard horses and wagons crossed wide rivers on the ice.  They wondered and asked why we didn’t come and live among them.  They really were very happy.

Again: 

On the way to the North Cape we visited a reindeer camp of the Laplanders.  A sailor from the ship was deputed to go with the party.  I walked homeward with him, and as we approached the fiord looking down and over to the opposite shore we saw a few straggling huts and one two-story house under construction.  What is that new building for? we asked.

     “That is to be the home of a man born in Tromso who has made
     a great deal of money and has now come back to spend his
     days there.  He is very rich.”