want you had better give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a supply of it just to oblige customers.  Its clerks work in the most languid, unexcited manner.  They have no object whatever in holding your trade, and you can wait until they are quite ready to serve you, or go home without.  True, most of them are merely negroes, and the few Americans at the head of departments are chiefly provincial little fellows from small towns whose notions of business are rather those of Podunk, Mass., than of New York.  But lolling about the commissary a half-hour hoping to buy a box of matches, one cannot shake off the conviction that it is the system more than the clerks.  Poets and novelists and politicians may work for “glory,” but no man is going to show calico and fit slippers for such remuneration.

Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method banished from the Zone.  In the Canal Record, the government organ, the government commissary advertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats at $1 each.  The “Record”!  It is like reading it in the Bible.  Witness the rush of bargain hunters, who, it proves, are by no means of one gender.  Yet those splendid rain-coats, as manager, clerks, and even negro sweepers well knew and could not refrain from snickering to themselves at thought of, were just as rain-proof as a poor grade of cheese-cloth.  I do not speak from hear-say for I was numbered among the bargain hunters—­“recruits” are the natural victims, and there arrive enough of them each year to get rid of worthless stock.  Ten minutes after making the purchase I set out to walk to Corozal through the first mild shower of the rainy season—­and arrived there I went and laid the bargain gently in the waste-basket of Corozal police station.

Thus does the government sink to the petty rascalities of shop-keepers.  Even a government manager on a fixed salary—­in work-coupons—­will descend to these tricks of the trade to keep out of the clutches of the auditor, or to make a “good record.”  The socialist’s answer perhaps would be that under their system government factories would make only perfect goods.  But won’t the factory superintendent also be anxious to make a “record”?  And even government stock will deteriorate on the shelves.

All small things, to be sure; but it is the sum of small things that make up that great complex thing—­Life.  Few of us would object to living in that ideal dream world.  But could it ever be?  I have anxiously asked this question and hinted at these little weaknesses suggested by Zone experiences to several Zone socialists—­who are not hard to find.  They merely answer that these things have nothing to do with the case.  But not one of them ever went so far as to demonstrate; and though I was born a long way north of Missouri I once passed through a corner of the state.