The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1896-08-20
AMERICAN TOURIST
VISITS MEXICO.
Not Unlike Types Seen in Our
Own Country.
AS TOLD BY A MEXICAN EDITOR
Museum Managers Expect TO Find
L. Everything From IPIgmies to Aeor-
IItes-Sweet Girl Graduates-SocIolo-
gfcaI students and TheOrIzers-

Frederic R. Guernsey, editor of the
Mexican Herald, writes to the Boston
Herald from the city of Mexico: Sci
ence sends many men here, and the
enterprise of the Chicago people is ex-
traordinary They are going to have
culture up in the Windy city, if they
have to rush things little, and they
send down their men of learning to
write a monograph on something or
other in three weeksi The pace of
science in Chicago is something awful
to contemplate, and it is pity Eugene
Field could not have lived to pay his
attention to the matter. Get facts,
novel facts, or resign, is the implied
injunction of the hustling university
on the shores of the Michigan's blue
lake.
One of their ethnologists has gone in
d whirl of scientific zeal down toward
Guatemala, expecting to find some pig
mics. | have no doubt he will find
on pigmies, the dwarfs will be forth
coming if they have to be improvised
for the occasion. Mexico has become
Chicago's happy hunting ground, and
recently the Field museum, which is
the embodiment of science with hustle
on, demonstrated against New York
museum having a special cinch on
Mexican antiquities, as was contem-
plated in a bill before Congress. We
are all going to be photographed, clas-
sified and properly labeled for the port
folios of the Field museum. One lady
here who knows Chicago only through
the late humorist, thought the Field
museum was collection of the eccen-
trio garments, books and pictures, and
the Gladstone AK of the poet-journalist.
The western tourists have the most
inquiring minds have ever encounter
ed. Their mental horizon is as i'm
mense as their own prairies, and they
are absolutely devoid of prejudice
Nothing shocks them. They want to
learn" and the LIE PlOngeon theory
that Yucatan was the true Garden OF
Eden set them by the ears. 1t is plain
that in the wide West everything is in
process of denomination, that the old
theology has been so ratified that 1t can
barely whisper that science must be al
ways up to date and no authority older
than five years is held in any sort OF
respect
A gentleman from Milwaukee came
here on a Herbert Spencer evangelizing
mission and incidentally converted me
from the cigarette habit. He was away
up in biology and carried Ribot's works
around under his arm. He said he was
going to reform away the custom OF
five centuries in as many weeks, and he
began heroically by refusing to allow
the peone and the street porter to carry
his grip; he said it was a serv1le GUS
tom and should be done away with.
He wrecked all his protoplasm in the
effort and carried his point. The poems
are wondering still, but any day L ex-
pect to see them listening to a lecture
from the Milwaukee man on Social
Ethics" up in the Plaza. Once in
while a tourist of the reforming type
does one good. He shows us how back
numberish we are how we keep down
the new woman, how we cultivate the
serf-Iike instincts of the lower classes,
how wicked lotteries are, and how ut
terly depraved is the cigarette habit.
The young women from the West are
wide between the eyes and look out on
life from co-educational point OF view.
Most of them have been all over Eu-
rope, and some of them have been up
the Nile. They are wild about culture,
and are immensely well read and are
confusing to the indolent tropical mind.
One would as soon think Of wedding a
cyclopedia though it must be confessed
that they are Americanized and up to
date Their minds are so advanced that
they lap over into the Goth century.
They have, to use a common phrase,
.sgot us down fine" for they point out
to us just where we are in the SOCIOLOGY
cal scale. They tell us we are Egyptian
crossed with the telephone and the
railway l like them; they are i'm
mense for three consecutive afternoons,
and then one gets his subjective mind
so overcharged with facts and theories
that the objective mind q think that is
what they call IT'D fairly refuses to haul
I'D ideas from the reservoir. We don
need so much intellect down here in
Mexico; it is cruel to try to educate us
in such a rapid course of lessons, for
we run away to talk to some black
eyed Mexican young woman who never
heard of biology, social statistics, dy-
namics, telepathy, the X rays or the
fauna of the north pole. What West
ern girl doesn't know would fill very
little book.
They will be the mothers of bulging-
proved college professors, of the origin
ators of grain combines, of the found
ers of universities and devisers of new
diets.
I used to think that Boston girls
were learned; but they belong some
where in the era of the China trade, in
telIectually speaking. They are literary
while the Western girls are scientific.
An Iowa maiden said to me, as we