Suddenly dusky signalmen wave their lanterns, and a seemingly interminable string of freight cars is discovered pulling slowly toward the dock. It is a banana train from the fertile interior of Costa Rica. Workmen are swarming to the shed, fellows of every hue and shade -powerful African blacks, coffee-colored natives, Jamaicans with their peculiar subcutaneous glow, and muscular whites from heaven knows where.

By two A.M. the immense automatic loading machines have been wheeled into position, have been clamped to the side of the ship, and have begun to discharge the contents of the freight train into the enormous holds. Under the glare of the electric lights on the dock an unforgetable scene is being enacted. The polyglot swarm of men who were a few minutes ago loafing aimlessly about have suddenly been galvanized into action, and are now working together like orderly parts of one highly

perfected mechanism.

The color of jade dominates the strange nocturnal scene. Every loading machine is now connected with the broad side door of one of the freight cars by a continuously revolving chain of dock workers, carrying bunches of bananas as green as emerald. The loading goes on without a hitch, night and day, until the hold is full. Cargoes of 75,000 or even 80,000 bunches are loaded in twelve to fourteen hours; and directly the loading is completed, the big white ship sails for its northern port.

SCIENCE GRAPPLES WITH THE JUNGLE

Back of this drama of the dock there is a monumental drama of modern science and commerce that the traveler behind the rail of the ship does not see or guess. These arriving dunes of jungle-green fruit are fitting symbols of a conquest of the torrid wilderness by private enterprise that has done more for the territories concerned than their governments themselves.

A day or two before one of the big banana ships steams into its port of supply, news of its approach is flashed to the jungle by wireless. This flash of news through the drowsy tropical air is picked up by telegraph and telephone, and is at once transmitted to the plantions and their outposts.

Suddenly the waiting banana lands ree themselves into swift and orderly

BY NEWTON FUESSLE

action. Cutting orders are tersely issued. Glittering blades chop the fruitbunches from their trees. Ox-carts and

freight cars are made ready, and in a few hours' time train-loads of bananas,

numbering twenty to forty cars, are winding their way to the waterfront to meet the approaching ship. Not a moment is permitted to be lost between the time the fruit is lopped off the trees and the time it goes aboard ship for its journey to the tables of the world.

Back of the voyages that scores of big, modern refrigerator ships are making to the tropics is a story of the conquest of obstacles that few enterprises have ever been compelled to face. It is the story of stupendous pioneer work in agriculture and commerce. These fruitgrowers have been compelled to enter some of the most forbidding jungles on the face of the earth and to tame them. They have had to devise their own methods as they fought their way in. They have had to become experts in hygiene, sanitation, and sociology itself.

These fruit-growers have penetrated regions where organized industry had never been known before. They have taught thousands of natives efficient team-work.

They have given steady

jobs to thousands of drowsy natives who were never on a pay-roll before. They have cleaned up jungles that used to be death-traps, have cleaned up mosquitobreeding swamps and marshes, and have sent forth an army of doctors to rout out disease. They have built houses, bakeries, laundries, water systems, and electric light plants for their

workmen, and have strung telephone. wires through the wilderness.

The northern farmer can scarcely comprehend the terrific fertility of the tropical soil where the rays of the sun descend like swords, and the jungle harbors innumerable slinking foes. Here is the native habitat of deadly fevers. But to-day vast areas of Colombia, South America, Central America, and the West Indies have been made habitable as the result of a great quest for yellow treasure. But it is not the yellow treasure sought by Morgan and his pirates. It is the yellow treasure that you can buy at any fruit-stand or grocery store for a few cents.

HUMID SLOPES WHERE BANANAS GROW

The low, gradual slopes of the Caribbean coasts are ideal for banana-growing. From here the world gets most of its bananas, and its best bananas. Here the hot days and humid nights, with an annual rainfall of from 80 to 200 inches, brood over some of the greatest fruit farms in the world. Hundreds of millions of dollars of American capital have been poured into the development of these great tracts. Railways, tramways, docks, villages, and hospitals have sprung up.

The farmer of the temperate zone would gasp if he could see these enormous farming projects. A selected locality is first thoroughly explored as to its fitness for banana cultivation, with respect to climate, soil, rainfall, drainage, liability to damage by floods and hurricanes, and the feasibility of secur

ing adequate labor and supplying transportation. Forests and brush have to be cleared away, great drainage ditches dug, and houses, railways, and tramways constructed. Only then does the actual planting begin.

The overseer or "mandador" of a banana plantation has to combine an assortment of executive qualities that would make an ordinary executive stagger under the load. He must understand the naïve simplicity of the laborers under his command, and must organize them into competent working units. He must understand the botany of the banana and the moods of the tropical soil and weather, and must know how to rush large shipments of the fruit, perhaps over many miles of rail, to a ship at a given time. He must understand housing, merchandising, sanitation, and medical requirements.

THE NEW SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE The banana trade has developed a new soldier of fortune, for this business requires courage and wits and stamina of a hardy quality and large dimensions. From the financiers at their desks in Boston and from the mariner on the bridge, down to ditch-diggers and docklaborers, the tropical fruit industry has no room in it for weaklings.

Between planting and harvest a banana plantation is subjected to all manner of hazards. Excessive rains may cause rivers to overflow, and may cause great losses. A hurricane may cause a total loss of the crop. Even wind storms blowing only twenty to thirty miles per hour often prove highly destructive, especially where the fruit is about ready to be cut. A drought may seriously retard the crop. Ravages of locusts and other insects sometimes occur.

The fruit trees of the north bear fruit year after year, but the banana tree bears only once, a single bunch, and is cut down when the fruit is harvested. Seed bulbs, or "bits," weighing from three to four pounds each, are planted, and it takes the tree from twelve to fifteen months to bear.

THE GENIUS OF THE BANANA TRADE

Great commercial demands invariably produce the genius required to fill them. And the world's demand for bananas produced the leader of the banana trade in Andrew W. Preston. He supplied both the penetrating insight into the

need and the skill and resourcefulness required to fill that need.

Back in the days when an occasional schooner limped into Boston with a cargo of bananas, it occurred to Mr. Preston to organize banana-growing and the banana trade on first-class modern lines. He broached the subject to various business men, but the latter, raised in the sheltered environment of their ferred to stick to manufacture and to ancestral New England factories, preknown factors of supply and demand. What? Chuck their money into growing bananas, and then import them 1,400 to 2,200 miles to Boston? No. It didn't sound businesslike.

But nine men were finally persuaded to join Mr. Preston. They put up $2,000 each, and a company was incorporated. Outsiders considered the venture about the biggest gamble this side of Monte Carlo. Perhaps that is why Mr. Preston's nine partners literally remained silent partners. They were shrewd enough, however, to agree that for five years the profits, if any, should be spent in development work.

That was the beginning of the bridge of bananas that to-day connects the tropics with every grocery store in the world.

HEALING BY WIRELESS

A few weeks ago the newspapers carried a remarkable despatch. It described a new system of medical service and consultation by radio for ships at sea, free to the ships of all nations, and primarily designed to assist vessels not carrying medical officers. It is another of Mr. Preston's ideas.

"This means," said Mr. Preston, "that the captain of any steamship requiring medical assistance may radio one of our hospitals or passenger ships through our radio stations, details of a c

ness or accident on his vessel, and receive without charge, so far as we are concerned, experienced medical advice. While the service is mainly for ships not carrying doctors, it is also at the disposal of vessels whose medical officers desire the benefit of consultation with other physicians. For instance, in the case of an obscure malady, or one where the patient's symptoms may indicate any of a number of complications, a ship's doctor may call our hospital staffs and medical men into consultation by radio, thus adding their knowledge and experience to his own as in medical practice on land."

WINTRY GALES IN HOLDS OF
TROPICAL SHIPS

After the banana's journey to the loading dock, and thence into the hold of the ship, a still stranger drama of modern science enacts itself. Throughout the ship's dash through tropical waters for its northern port, the temperature in the holds is kept at about 54 degrees. The fruit is cooled to the required tempearture by refrigerating apparatus. The air is passed over brine-coils, which cool and dry it, and it is then circulated by fans through the fruit holds.

The same careful inspection and rigid temperature requirements attend the fruit on its journey by rail to the final point of distribution; and the ripening occurs only in the banana rooms of the jobber. Ripening consists of vital changes that take place within the cells of the fruit, which is at length placed on the market as a matured product at its highest intrinsic value, having developed the correct color, firmness, flavor, and the highest degree of food value.

FROM THE WORKSHOP OF THE GODS

The banana is apparently as old as tropical fertility itself. The ancients of Egypt and Assyria had their bananas and cream, separately even if not in the same dish. Alexander the Great found large banana tracts in India, and must have consumed the fruit thereof with the same relish confessed in later years by Prime Minister Disraeli, who said:

"The most delicious thing in the world is a banana."

For centuries the banana has engaged the ingenuity of cooks and chefs, and yet the public generally is just awakening to the value of the banana as a daily food. Its use in cakes, fritters, custards, salads, and in the festive banana-split at soda fountains, is, of course, common. But many people are surprised to learn that a banana can be baked, fried, and cooked in numerous other ways.

It comes to the culinary stage ready to play a dual rôle. It is both a fruit and a vegetable. Down near the equator the natives cut it up green and eat it in soup. It is roasted green and fried green in butter. I have even seen banana flour at the grocery store.

The best time to eat a banana is when

the ripening process has advanced to the point where its skin begins to darken and to become slightly discolored, for then its pulp is mellow, its flavor and sweetness are at their best, and it is most easily digested. If a banana is a little under-ripe, don't put it in the icechest. Let it ripen at a normal temperature; too low a temperature damages the fine flavor that comes with normal ripening.

If you ever feel any suspicion of bananas because they are cut green, dismiss it. The banana is always cut green, even when consumed by natives in the tropics, for if it is allowed to ripen on the plant it becomes insipid in flavor.

IN A GERM-PROOF PACKAGE

Almost as much fuss is made in foodproduct manufacturing circles these days about containers and packages as about the goods themselves. The invention of an appropriate patent container has made many a man a tidy fortune. But the pulp of the banana comes to you in a carefully developed container, invented by the lady known as Mother Nature. It is a germ-proof package, hermetically sealed. No worm, blight, or insect sting affects the fruit within.

Are you concerned with calories, vitamines, and such-like scientific novelties?

Then behold in the banana a food brimful of nourishment. It contains three times the protein of the apple, nearly twice as much carbohydrate and three times as much fat as the orange, and exceeds the potato by about twenty per cent in fuel or food value.

Professor Samuel C. Prescott, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finds that the banana provides more actual food for the same cost than any other fresh fruit, vegetable, or fish, and more than meat, milk, or eggs. He reports that the banana is a far more useful all-round food than a pure meat diet. Ripe bananas, with their powerful tissue-building character, are especially recommended for growing children.

During the past ten years Mr. Preston and his associates have grown and shipped 284,000,000 bunches of bananas from the tropics, of which 230,000,000 bunches were served on the tables of the United States. But the continuous flood of this green gold product of the tropics to the tables of the world is much more than an ambitious venture in agriculture and distribution. It has changed ancient civilizations, and has bound together North America, Central America, South America, and the West Indies in a lasting knot that has proved profitable to them all.

We have asked Senator Davenport, who is in the Middle West, to send us some letters of special correspondence from that section of the country, interesting at all times, but especially interesting in a year when politics is in motion. The

A

N editor sitting at a desk in the East knows about as much of what the country is thinking as a Congressman sitting in a swivel chair in the House building in Washington. Both rational political changes and irrational political convulsions are more apt to come out of the West than out of any other part of America. This section is full of political laboratories, has always been full of them. So has the Far West. This is the great experimental ground of political America, and it is altogether a good thing, I think, to have new schemes, progressive, reactionary, radical, tried out in a small area while the country looks on.

or

During this summer the Middle West has been acting up again politically. First came Beveridge with a triumph over the sitting Senator New in Indiana. There were many of a very regular persuasion who hoped this would not happen again; but it did. Pinchot crossed the line in Pennsylvania. And ever since the crashes have come at intervals. Other new types of United States Senators have arisen over night. Brookhart in Iowa, with a far-reaching programme of economic reform; Frazier, of North Dakota, the Non-partisan Leaguer, only recently catapulted from the Governorship by process of the recall; another Roosevelt leader, Howell, of Nebraska; and last but not least, the erratic and invincible La Follette, of Wisconsin, who is by a great majority restored to his pristine political glory.

And all of them Republicans, coming through in the primaries of their own party. The Democratic party for the time being seems to have lost vitality, is simply marking time, waiting for something to turn up. But the Republican electorate in the Middle West is again on the rampage, looking for change or bound to know the reason why. It is likely to be the shifting of large bodies of quasi-Republicans to the other side which will make the party changes in the House and Senate and in the Governorships, if changes there be.

What is it all about? What has the Middle West in the back of its head? Why is Main Street stirred out of itself? Has it any distinct, conscious urge, or is it all an inchoate protest? I try simply to interpret things as I find them. I may agree with them, I may not, but I record.

through without shipwreck. But many persons in the Middle West are beginning to think that the captain must be much more particular about his pilots, at least in domestic waters. The tariff, the bonus, the strikes-she rolls in the trough of the sea. It is time now for genuine friends of both the Administration and the country to determine, if they can, what public opinion of America is trying to say, because public opinion in America has more force and guidance in it than public opinion in any other land. Many persons in the Middle West think that the greatest single criticism which can be made upon the present leadership of Washington is that it has not aroused and inspired the general public opinion of the country. They think it has not informed public opinion, nurtured it, and listened to it sufficiently.

I begin with Indiana. Indiana has a fringe of radicalism, a fringe of stolid reaction, but is in the main progressive. It is usually ready to move forward. There is a reason for the return of Beveridge. The truth of it seems to be that Beveridge fits into the present state of mind of Indiana. The people in that State have been figuring up their taxes. These aggregate sixty dollars a person, three hundred and sixty dollars to the family, as compared with something like four hundred and fifty dollars a family in Massachusetts and more than five hundred dollars in New York. The economic times have been out of joint for farmers and laborers. Something is felt to be wrong. Beveridge fits into the state of protest, as La Follette fits into it in Wisconsin and Pinchot in Pennsylvania.

Another factor favoring Beveridge is his constructive writing of the monumental work upon John Marshall. This may be a curious and amusing phenomenon in politics, but it is reassuring. In Indiana the Negro committeeman in the farthest town seems to know about this magnum opus of Beveridge, at least to the extent of believing that something terrible has happened! But the thoughtful people are proud of it-particularly in Indiana, where a piece of work of genuine literary merit counts for so much. This is a good sign, isn't it, that people should generally appreciate constructive work on the part of public servants? There is a returning pride in the ability of Beveridge in Indiana, and a belief that a mind like his will be useful in Washington where the supply of thinkers is certainly nothing like as

The Administration at Washington is regarded out here as in the trough of the sea, where it must be conceded other Administrations have been when halfway over their course. It may come great as the demand.

And then Beveridge has his roots in the past in the State. He has been previously known as a great antagonist of child labor on the floor of the Senate of the United States and a protagonist of pure food laws and the regulation of packers. He fought his campaign in the recent primaries on very different issues which seem amazingly conservative—. attacking the Adamson Law of 1916, with its kotowing to labor, attacking the excess profits tax and the high income taxes as economically unsound, because there is little left, as he asserted, for investment in general industry, and, consequently, a return to "good times" is delayed. He attacked all kinds of blocsfarmers' blocs, capitalistic blocs, whisky blocs, prohibition blocs, anything that looked like a bloc. The progressive people of Indiana do not understand that this indicates any fundamental change in the philosophy of Beveridge since he wrote the Life of John Marshall and studied closely the great Federal conservatives of the post-revolutionary period. In his attitude toward labor, for example, they think that he is driving at the control of government by labor blocs and labor intimidations and unreasonable practices, just as earlier he drove at the reprehensible practices of capital blocs.

He is likely to be elected. It is not a cinch, but a probability. Republicans carried the State by 180,000 two years ago, I believe. There will be a terrible falling off. What beat New for Senator was the unrest. Beveridge will profit by it, and unrest will vote for him at the election just as it did at the primary, and there will be no organized opposition to him on the part of the regulars. There is belief that New is proving a bad loser, but that the regulars generally wish Beveridge elected and expect to help. The progressive element, led now by men like Edward C. Toner, the owner of the Anderson "Herald," are for Beveridge because his career has been sound from their standpoint. Toner was a candidate for Governor a short time ago and is a leading figure. The Beveridge forces seem to be taking nothing for granted, are looking for a big slump in the majority, but expect to see Beveridge the high man on the ticket and the rest of the ticket victorious with him by a moderate margin. If New had been nominated in the Senatorial primary, the whole ticket would probably have been beaten. It is to be hoped that the Republican regulars appreciate what an infusion of life into the politics of various States has come this year from +