ols and colleges scattered over the republic in
which he was interested. He wanted to see these lands heavily fertilised
with capital.

"If you have any spare money," he said, "put it into----"

I think he said fruit farming in Colombia. Whatever the business was--I
forgot at the time to make a note of the particulars--he promised that
it would develop enormously when the Panama Canal was opened. The advice
may have been perfectly sound; but I do not think it was disinterested.
Bishop Zacchary Brown was not anxious about my future or my fortune. He
did not care, cannot have cared, whether the Panama Canal made me rich
or not. Nor did it seem to him an important thing that the fruit trade
of South America should develop. What he cared for was his conception
of religion. He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his
Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion
of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation,
was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of
Cartagena.

At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at
the house of one of Ascher's banker friends. We talked to each other in
French, and, as we both spoke the language badly, understood each other
without much difficulty. It is one of the peculiarities of the French
language that the worse it is spoken the easier it is to understand. A
real Parisian baffles me completely. My Brazilian statesman was almost
always intelligible.

He was interested in international politics, the international politics
of the western hemisphere. I found that he was distrustful of the
growing power of the United States. He suspected a policy of Empire,
a far-reaching scheme of influence, if not actual dominion, centred in
Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such
an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue
with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States
are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by
looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I
gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the
increase of wealth and therefore power in the South American republics.

"Our natural resources," he said, "are enormous, but undeveloped. We
cannot become strong in a military sense. We cannot possess fleets with
which to negotiate----"

I