One Young Colonizer

Slender and inky black President Charles Dunbar Burgess King of Liberia welcomes nowadays many a white U. S. youth arriving to earn his fortune on the new and mighty plantations of U. S. Rubberman Harvey Firestone (TIME, Dec. 20, 1926). One such ambitious colonizer was Thomas B. Wells, 26, a Yale graduate. With his young wife he recently went out to what seemed a promising job on one of the Firestone plantations. There he contracted malaria. Prudent, he and his wife left Liberia, speeded home. Last week they were crossing the Atlantic aboard the French Line's majestic Ile de France.

Nearer drew the ship to land. But also Death drew nearer. The race was ended when the Ile de France was still a day distant from Manhattan. As the liner docked, young Mrs. Wells said that she would take the malaria wasted body of her husband home to Minneapolis for burial.

Among a colonizing and militantly imperial race, like the British, such an incident would seem trivial, minuscule. But so fledgling and unmilitant is U. S. imperialism that the death of even one young colonizer as he raced for home does not lack poignant significance.