would mean the overcrowding of the four. But I attended all of them, and found only one filled. Certainly the Yucatecans are less "religious" than other Mexicans.

They are less religious in the formal sense of the word. But in the true sense of the word, in its spiritual sense, they are as religious as any class of people in Mexico. They are more serious than the natives of central and northern Mexico, more intelligent, and have more self-respect. They are a people who laugh little, but who smile a great deal.

Indeed, a land of smiles and sunshine is Yucatan. Merida, one of the most beautiful cities of Mexico, is admittedly the cleanest. Its seventy-two miles of asphalt pavement are well washed. The prevailing white and light-blue color scheme of the houses reflects the dazzling sun with a brilliancy which can be viewed serenely only through smoked. glasses. The city has an Oriental look, derived partly from the quasi-minarets on some of the churches and public buildings, and partly from the dress of the lower classes. The women wear the hipil, a one-piece dress hanging from shoulders to ankles without a girdle, and decorated with beautiful hand embroidery even when the wearer is a chambermaid. Some of the workmen wear around their heads a sort of tight bag, called the pita, which falls in a loose fold down their backs, and from the waist to the knees over the white cloth trousers of the country they wear an apron called the delantare. Thus attired they look as Egyptian as if they had just stepped from a bas relief.

These people understand the art of living. Few cities have so many happy-looking persons to the thousand as Merida. To look at these Indians of the lower classes in their homes, at work, or on the streets sometimes makes you wonder if our civilization is worth while. A beautiful, shy people they are, temperate, clean, and, by Mexican standards, industrious. Even the traveling salesmen lolling about the patios of the hotels seem to have more soul and less paunch than the "drummers" of St. Louis or Pittsburgh.

That the Yucatecans are not cowards their history proves, but, although some of their Indians have been fighting the Government of Mexico for several generations, most of them care little for soldiering. When angry, they think first of their fists, as we Americans do-not, like most Mexicans, of their knives.

In fact, Yucatan is full of contrasts with the rest of Mexico. There is little crime in

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Yucatan, and most of the men in prison are natives of other States. There are few beggars, almost no starvation, a great deal of prosperity, little dirt, little disease except some tuberculosis and the ever-present but now limited amount of yellow fever. There are few soldiers. The only ones in the State were brought from the north by Alvarado, and it is a fact that in Yucatan there are fewer soldiers than school teachers!

Such is the land where and such the people among whom Salvador Alvaras has been trying to create a Utopia. On the whole, for a human being, he has done mighty well. That he is just according to his lights is indicated by the enemies he has made. His greatest enemies are the millionaire henequen planters whose handsome city homes line both sides of the Paseo de Montejo, the most beautiful street in Mexico east or south of the country's capital. Even under former despots they enjoyed the prerogatives of privileged baronial vassals of the crown, but Alvarado has cut into their profits to improve the lot of the common man and of the State. The Governor also enjoys the hatred of certain labor leaders who, when they found that the wings of the capitalists were being clipped, tried themselves to soar to unwonted heights of power, only to find to their sorrow that there is only one god on Olympus in Yucatan and his name is Alvarado.

The narration of the full list of the Governor's reforms and plans for reform would fill an entire issue of The Outlook. He is planning eventual Government ownership of all public utilities. At present his Government operates two steamers under charter between New Orleans and Progreso, and operates all the railways in the State, allowing the owners dividends up to fourteen per cent of the profits. A huge plant for the manufacture of sacking from sisal hemp is under construction by the Government. With $6,000,000 representing the profits on the sale of henequen over and above each planter's share, a State bank has just been founded which will lend money to the planters. But Alvarado has shown his keenness by centering his efforts on the removal of the evils which are the principal ills of all Mexico

lack of education by the masses, unfair apportionment of land, and abuses of temporal power by the Church.

We have glanced at his handling of the Church and school problems, and found the first, on the whole, good, although too harsh

at times, and the second entirely good. He has done less to remedy the faults of the land system than to improve the system of education; nevertheless, what he has done with the land is interesting.

Up to the time when I left Yucatan (about the first of October) in five towns the Governor had distributed about three hundred and fifty lots of land of fifty acres each. That is to day, three hundred and fifty landless persons, many of them just freed from peonage, were given fifty acres of land apiece by the Government. This land was all uncultivated; part of it belonged to the Government and part of it belonged to wealthy men from whom it was taken either because they had not cultivated it or because they were "enemies of the cause." Each person receiving such land was required to do a fixed amount of work on it annually. After a certain number of years, if he had done his expected share of development, the land would become his in fee.

Of course to give homesteads to three hundred and fifty people out of the three hundred thousand in the State is a small beginning, still it is a beginning, toward righting the greatest wrong in Mexico-land monopoly.

What sort of man is he who dares to try to establish his conception of Utopia in this seat of ancient civilization where the marks of the impermanency of man and his institutions are on every side? A ferocious man, a hangman, a wineglass-eater, and a lover of gun play of the common Mexican type, the newcomer to Yucatan is led to believe by some advance reports. But imagine that newcomer's surprise when he finds instead a solid man of medium height, neat but not dapper, with a quick smile never far from his lips and a slow one always in his eyes. Alvarado looks no more like the common fire-eating type of Mexican general than he looks like a bishop. He looks a good deal like the quiet business man that he was before the Madero revolution. He looks more like an inventor or some sort of experimenter in love with his work, for his manner is always animated and his eyes have a peculiar way of resting on you softly, and at the same time apparently looking beyond you at some problem which is reflected on their owner's mind.

Alvarado is an enthusiast, he is an inventor, he is an experimenter, deeply interested in what he is doing. This is why even his

enemies, if they see him often enough to keep his vision fresh in their minds, have one good word for him. Some of the Governor's enemies living abroad have nothing good to say of him, but every one of his enemies whom I interviewed in Yucatan admitted that he was sincere, and, according to Mexican standards, honest. Alvarado may be putting by a few thousands for himself, they say, but in a country in which the commonest weakness in public officials and the commonest charge against them is dishonesty in financial matters I never heard the charge of serious corruption made against the GovWhat his enemies do say is that he is impulsive, unbalanced, violent, even crazy, and that he is upsetting the established order of society. The last charge against him he admits; in fact, it is his boast. But he is not crazy, unless all radical reformers are crazy. unless Karl Marx and Mazzini were crazy.

ernor.

In fact, waiving the question of the desirability of the innovations introduced by Alvarado, what I like best about him is his consistency in applying them. For he is the rare example of the public official who performs in office what he promises beforehand. He has convictions and the courage of them in a country in which both these qualities are rare. In a country which is full of fake revolutionists Alvarado is a real revolutionist. And the former are much more dangerous than the latter.

But to take up the question of the merit of Alvarado's public acts, which we just waived momentarily, my conclusion is that his acts, in the main, have done more good than harm. He has gone to unwise extremes sometimes, especially in his treatment of the Church, but, in the last analysis, even his treatment of the Church has resulted in more good than evil. He has done a great deal to improve the condition of labor; he has suppressed crime and maintained order. And even his enemies praise his encouragement of temperance and the establishment of schools. On the whole, he is the best Governor Yucatan ever had, and he is the best public official of great power I have ever met in Mexico.

The question of the right and wrong of the seizure of the henequen monopoly must be

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reserved for another article. Suffice it to say here that the Yucatecans, in the mass, are better off for the policy which has reduced the profits of some of the wealthy planters and raised the price of binder twine to the American farmers. Alvarado's rule is arbitrary, but is giving Yucatan the only government that can come to Mexicans to-day from within, the only government they understand--a benevolent despotism.

The faults of Alvarado s government are the inherent faults of despotisms. Its virtues are the virtues of well-intended despotisms. Alvarado is a wiser despot than Diaz, for while Diaz developed the agriculture, mines, railways, and material resources of Mexico, he neglected the schools, he neglected to develop human minds. Alvarado has developed both material and human resources. All his work for prohibition, for education, and for other improvement has been financed by funds from the sale of the green gold of Yucatan.

But Alvarado can hardly last. Already his downfall is plotted in Mexico City by bureaucrats who resent his independence. Some day a general will descend on Yucatan with a larger army than Alvarado's, and the quiet man with the smiling brown eyes will go down in the ruins of the Utopia he has been trying to build. For the Yucatecans will not stand by Alvarado. They will not stand by him because they will not stand by themselves; they will not stand by him because the people who have profited by a despotism never stand by the despot in his hour of need. Some Yucatecans say they would prefer American intervention to Alvarado, but if they got it some of them would be dis

appointed. For such people do not want such justice as would be given them by the administration of a man like General Wood or General Funston. The graft would not be good.

The weakness of Yucatan is the weakness of all Mexico— the inability of a large portion of the people to do anything for themselves, the inability even to know what they want; and, forsooth, in the very temporary strength of the Yucatan Government to-day the world has an object-lesson in the weakness of Mexican government in general.

E

VERY tourist to Japan does three things he sits through a geisha dinner, he goes to a native theater, he buys some color prints and some of the porcelain made especially for foreign importation. This trinity of adventures accomplished, he usually plans a book on "The Soul of the Orient;" and to the cultivated Japanese this is a very ungentlemanly procedure. Little does globe-trotting innocence suspect that to the well-born Japanese color prints are crude and vulgar, a substitute for art peculiar to the lowest classes and bearing all the ear-marks of their origin. In our smug acceptance of the geisha as one of the delightful sides of the "naughtiness" of the East we have won for ourselves a

dubious reputation abroad. And when the Occidental establishes himself to witness a play (usually unconsciously setting up in himself a spectacle more diverting than the one offered on the stage) he is blissfully ignorant of the fact that he is identifying himself with a form of amusement that a Japanese gentleman would be squeamishly circumspect about indulging in; for the theater in Japan has until very recent years been beyond the pale of respectability, and within the memory of living man actors were counted by the census-takers, not as human beings, but as dogs or live stock. By our failure to make social discriminations in our enjoyment of things Japanese we have won for ourselves in the East a reputation not flattering to our refinement. To judge Japan truly we must study those aspects of its culture that have been fostered by the best intellect and the best blood: the literature, the painting, the old crafts, the elegant accomplishments, such as the floral arts and the tea ceremony (cha-no-yu), and the aristocratic pastimes, such as the Japanese opera, or No. The No is the old classical lyric drama, dating in its origins, so say the old chronicles, to the time of the gods. The Sun Goddess, it is related, disgusted at the unseemly pranks of her brother Susano, shut herself up in the rock cave of heaven and left the world in darkness. The gods assembled in their myriads in the dry bed of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way) to devise some

scheme to lure the Sun Goddess out of her retirement. As one last expedient, Ame-noUzume (the Terrible Female of Heaven), garbing herself fantastically and standing on an inverted wooden tub that gave out a

hollow sound when she stamped

on it, performed a mimic dance that made the universe shake with the laughter of the myriad gods. The Sun Goddess, curious as to the cause of the boisterous mirth, slid back the door of her cave and peeped forth. A variation of this dance, called the Kagura, is performed to this day at Shinto festivals to the sound of fife and drum; and it is in the Kagura that we have the origins of the No. When the dance and music of the Kagura

were supplemented by words, the Japanese opera was the result. This addition of words was made by the Buddhist priests at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the No came to be acted with great stateliness and splendor at the great Shinto shrines to propitiate the chief deities. The manager of one of these No theaters at Nara (the ancient capital) attracted the notice of the ruling Shogun, under whose patronage the No came to be an accomplishment of the aristocracy.

Very soon the Nō obtained an extraordinary vogue. With the sole exception of the Emperor himself, every great personage took part in these performances; a stage was erected within the precincts of the palace; costumes of the costliest were procured. By degrees the practice of this art became a profession, but the aristocracy still have continued to study it assiduously, even down to the present day. And now, in the shadow of the temples, thanks to its preservation by a hereditary caste, it is still not infrequently performed in the old costumes and to the old steps of six hundred years ago; performed before audiences composed almost exclusively of ex-Daimios, or military nobles and their ex-retainers-for to the vulgar the Vo is completely unintelligible.

The first time that I went to the No was in Hiroshima. With the coming of the gentle spring rains that tangled the fine threads of the green willows and sent the cherry petals fluttering like the ghosts of snow-flakes it