As to the other side of the ledger,—­equal pay for all, nowhere is man further from socialism than on the Canal Zone.  Caste lines are as sharply drawn as in India, which should not be unexpected in an enterprise largely in charge of graduates of our chief training-school for caste.  The Brahmins are the “gold” employees, white American citizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto appertaining.  But—­and herein we out-Hindu the Hindus—­the Brahmin caste itself is divided and subdivided into infinitesimal gradations.  Every rank and shade of man has a different salary, and exactly in accordance with that salary is he housed, furnished, and treated down to the least item,—­number of electric lights, candle-power, style of bed, size of bookcase.  His Brahmin highness, “the Colonel,” has a palace, relatively, and all that goes with it.  The high priests, the members of the Isthmian Canal Commission, have less regal palaces.  Heads of the big departments have merely palatial residences.  Bosses live in well-furnished dwellings, conductors are assigned a furnished house—­or quarter of a house.  Policemen, artisans, and the common garden variety of bachelors have a good place to sleep.  It is doubtful, to be sure, whether one-fourth of the “Zoners” of any class ever lived as well before or since.  The shovelman’s wife who gives five-o’clock teas and keeps two servants will find life different when the canal is opened and she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and learns again to do her own washing.

At work, “on the job” there is a genuine American freedom of wear-what-you-please and a general habit of going where you choose in working clothes.  That is one of the incomprehensible Zone things to the little veneered Panamanian.  He cannot rid himself of his racial conviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is building a canal must be of inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat and a tall hat.  The real “Spig” could never do any real work for fear of soiling his clothes.  He cannot get used to the plain, brusk American type without embroidery, who just does things in his blunt, efficient way without wasting time on little exterior courtesies.  None of these childish countries is man enough to see through the rough surface.  Even with seven years of American example about him the Panamanian has not yet grasped the divinity of labor.  Perhaps he will eons hence when he has grown nearer true civilization.

But among Americans off the job reminiscences of East India flock in again.  D, who is a quartermaster at $225, may be on “How-are-you-old-man?” terms with G, who is a station agent and draws $175.  But Mrs. D never thinks of calling on Mrs. G socially.  H and J, who are engineer and cranemen respectively on the same steam-shovel, are probably “Hank” and “Jim” to each other, but Mrs. H would be horrified to find herself at the same dance with Mrs. J. Mrs. X, whose husband is a foreman at $165, and whose dining table is a full six inches longer