One World

The Palau islanders are bewildered and unhappy; so are U.S. civil affairs officers who rule them now. Navy Lieut. John Useem tells about it in the American Journal of Sociology:

The Japs told the Palauans that flies helped make the sugar cane grow. U.S. sanitation experts came and set traps for the flies. The Palauans released their little friends. The experts tried explaining their point to the natives by showing a slide of a greatly magnified fly, his legs dripping with microbes. The Palauans nodded in sudden, pitying comprehension: if they had monstrously big flies like those of the U.S., they, too, would kill them; but their flies were little, never grew up to be such monsters.

It was explained that the flies harbored tiny, invisible disease carriers. Again the Palauans nodded; time was when they too had this superstitious belief in invisible demons. But since they became Christians they had dropped all that nonsense.

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