Sputtering Patriots

Sirs:

You may be interested to receive a report of the accomplishment of your periodical in the West Indies and Panama.

"Pan American rights v. North American satrapy," so debates Latin American youth, readers of TIME.

Chafing at kindly paternalism that replies "the U. S. has your interest at heart" and supplies clean streets, excellent hospitals, clinics and roads, Central and South American patriots sputter ominous objections to the "Anglo-Saxon" regime.

Panamian TIME fans read Karl Marx (El Capital), The Life of Lenin, Emerson, Wisest American, Chekhov, Dostoevski, Keyserling, James Joyce. Best sellers from the pen of local authors:

America Latino, y el Imperialismo Americano --Louis Guilaume.

La Politica Internacional en America, Pasada, Presente, Futuro--Fernandez y Medina.

Norte America y los Norte Americanos--Andrew Cipolla.

El Imperialismo del Petrolio y la Paz Mundial --Camillo Trelles.

This last a treatise on the dangers of the Standard Oil Dynasty.

Latin America awaits a statement of policy from Washington about the founding of a Pan American University. At present South & Central America send their youth to college in Europe, the U. S., or not at all. If the U. S. would only help, we would contribute gladly to a University in Panama.

Why not take into account the intelligence and mentality of these people? Why not realize they will never be satisfied to give up their own culture, traditions and heritage for the sake of material wellbeing?

To be sure we continue to re-hash the Monroe Doctrine. We appoint and send commissioners to investigate, to advise, to report. We maintain our traditional aloofness to foreign entanglements. Why not consider the state rights of citizens of the Western Hemisphere in line with our own political experience? In the meanwhile our sister republics read and reread TIME. The unofficial promise it contains, the friendly American grin it brings to mind vanishes dread bugaboos of imperialistic satraps and oil barons.

TIME international news sheet, hats off to you.

WINTHROP B. PALMER

Fairfield, Conn.

To Subscriber Palmer, hats off for a TIME-worthy report on the Latin-American frame of mind.--ED.

Baby-Eating

Sirs:

I wish you would please have a talk with your editor who writes items on China. I suggest that he might eliminate once in a while reference to the six million starving Chinese who are constantly being forced to eat their babies when they are able to catch them.

... It may be that human beings have been eaten in isolated cases but unfortunately your editor gives the idea that this is just a little pastime. . . .

HUGH MACKENZIE

Passenger Traffic Manager Dollar Steamship Lines Inc., Ltd. San Francisco, Calif.

Let the most timid of travelers not fear to visit any Chinese place on the itinerary of a major steamship line or world cruise. (Safest of all Chinese places are the International Quarter at Shanghai guarded by white police, Peiping where U. S. Marines are quartered, and the British part of Hongkong.)

But let no ordinary traveler strike off alone into China's bandit-infested hinterlands; and all travelers know that the only well-guarded railways in China proper are the short line connecting Nanking, the new capital, with the seaport of Shanghai, and the slightly longer one connecting Peiping (formerly Peking) with the seaport of Tientsin.

TIME will continue to report at decent intervals baby-eating and other newsworthy aspects of the ghastly, unparalleled famine which continues to ravage certain Chinese provinces (see map), a famine so titanic that the Red Cross, despairing, has ceased to give aid. At least 8,000.000 people have already died. Sole agency of succor is the American Board of Famine Relief, 205 East 42nd St., Manhattan.

The famine area is remote from "show places" of interest to travelers, who will see no babies eaten; but in the streets of Native Shanghai (not International Shanghai) there were picked up last year, according to the Shanghai Benevolent Society's official report, the corpses of 28,620 yellow babes.--ED. Again, Norfolk

Sirs:

Whether the article on Bernard Norfolk [England's Premier Duke who recently came of age] is true or untrue, I think it is horrid to publish such a thing. In this case, it is completely untrue. The Duke of Norfolk failed to get into Oxford because of his varied and incomplete education (although not by nurse and private tutors as TIME says). He is one of the most intelligent boys I know and I know no boy so well equipped to carry out the tremendous responsibilities with which he has been left.

It seems to me a great pity for a paper to write so scathingly of people.

CAROLYN C. MAXWELL

London, England

Spa

Sirs:

. . . There were 235,000 people who died of cardiac troubles last year in the U. S., and there must have been many times that number who suffered from these troubles who, I believe, could either be cured or relieved by such institutions as that we are endeavoring to build at Saratoga (TIME, March 3). I have been informed that more people die of cardiac diseases yearly than from cancer, pneumonia and tuberculosis combined. I do not say that Saratoga, when completed as a spa and health resort, could by itself cure or relieve any large proportion of these sufferers, but it could be of service to thousands. I do not like to see a stone put in the path of those who are endeavoring to accomplish what I think will be a great boon to the chronically ill, and at a cost that is not comparable with what is going to be spent upon new prisons for our criminals.

BERNARD M. BARUCH

New York City

Wrong Munroe

Sirs:

As the wife of "Author Kirk Munroe," I wish to call your attention to a gross error in your issue of March 3.

Your story under Aeronautics, captioned "Stop Thief," is worse than misleading, it is little short of cruel.

Kirk Munroe has been for several years seriously ill, and in a sanitarium in Florida. Some of his friends know this, but many others do not. These friends are scattered throughout the north, especially in New York City and New England (outside of Florida).

The boat in question was owned by a man whose name happens to be Munroe, but there is not the slightest relationship or connection with Kirk Munroe.

MABEL STEARNS MUNROE Coconut Grove, Fla.

TIME sincerely regrets having confused Author Kirk Munroe (The Flamingo Feather, With Crockett and Bowie, The Outcast Warrior) with Worth Munroe, son of onetime Commodore R. M. Munroe of the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club (of which Author Munroe is a member). The episode: Munroe Sr.'s sloop having been stolen from its anchorage, Munroe Jr. sped after it in a seaplane, recovered it at pistol point.--ED.

Muscular Mind

Sirs:

In your issue of March 10 I am referred to as "hardboiled hobo novelist." This may be quite true, but it may be possible to grow weary of truth. I smiled over the words myself, but several of my friends thought that in your effort to be staccato you might create a false impression.

For nearly ten years now I've watched unoriginal phrases crop up about me until I wonder just when I'll be able to stand on my own. Cannot a fellow be down to fundamentals as a writer and have muscles in his mind without being called hardboiled? I was a hobo and sometimes worse for seven years as a youth. A lad with no home is better off as a vagabond under the present economic system. So of my career I have nothing to be ashamed. Have I not earned, by labor that would kill ten oxen and a dozen editors, the right to be called something else besides a "hobo-novelist"? I am not a writer of romance for stenographers and club women--so therefore I am no longer a hobo. You don't refer to a senator as "shyster-politician," do you?

I realize of course that I am better known as a hobo than as a writer. Men are more interested in vagabondage. JIM TULLY

Hollywood, Calif.

Not again will TIME call muscular-minded Author Tully a "hardboiled hobo novelist."--ED.

Eyes in Athens

Sirs:

In the Jan. 27 number of TIME an article appeared in the Foreign News section, stating that in Athens, Greece, 40 children had been blinded for life, owing to hospital orderlies spraying the eyes of these 40 children with nitrate of silver.

The report sent you was premature, and although the cause of the accident, faulty sterilization, is no less crime than the spraying of carbolic, fortunately the results were not as disastrous as stated.

All the children were suffering from an epidemic now rampant among the refugees, two of them having an additional microbe, however, which the doctor failed to detect. From these two children eight others were infected. Of the ten, one child is blind, six have lost the sight of one eye, and three are still under treatment with hopes of complete recovery. The doctor responsible for this carelessness has been dismissed.

This affair is greatly to be deplored, but when the handicap of poverty as it is known by this country is taken into consideration, the wonder is that so few such cases occur. The great majority of Greek doctors have studied and trained in the universities and hospitals of France and Germany, but even those great countries have yet to produce the infallible doctor.

The almost superhuman effort with which this heroic people has faced her economic and social problems deserves the respect and admiration of all the civilized world, and also its moral support. Being an American born, with all an American's love of "fair play," I cannot but challenge an article which would make them appear barbarian.

MME. PHOKION ZAIMIS

Athens, Greece

Herrick Praised

Sirs:

The mention of the name of Myron T. Herrick in letter [from Reginald Sutton of Boston] appearing under the heading "Pollution?" in your issue of March 10, and the inferences therein made constitute nothing short of a dastardly defilement of a man whose life, character, ability and patriotism were of the highest order.

The record of Myron T. Herrick needs no defense.

Would to God that our Embassies were filled with men of his type.

What species of shortsighted, flagwaving, hundred percenter has the audacity to assail this great diplomat whose passing has left a vacancy that will be long in the filling?

BERTRAM W. SAUNDERS

Verona, N. J.

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