his convalescence at the comfortable rest-home on the beautiful island of Taboga in Panama Bay. Instead of losing his pay in gambling, which is strictly forbidden and effectively kept out of the Zone, he and the other employees send home over a quarter of a million dollars worth of postal money-orders every month. He no longer spends his noon hours and evenings at a saloon, but at one of the Government club-houses or recreation-buildings, reading, bowling, playing basket-ball, and otherwise enjoying himself. Or he can drop into the lodge-room of his fraternal order,—as an "old Canal man" of 1904, Bill Smith would certainly belong either to the "Incas," or the "Society of the Chagres." He works for union hours for better than union pay, and every year he and his family are given first-class passages at reduced rates to New York and back on one of the Government-owned ships of the Panama Railroad Steamship Line, and a six-weeks' vacation in the United States.
Bill Smith is not a real man, but his name is the only thing about him that is "make-believe." He is a typical example of the employees on the "gold roll," virtually all of whom are American citizens. But even with such housing and treatment and an annual trip to colder and more bracing air, a northern white man could not do good pick-and-shovel work in the tropics. So the great bulk of the force, below the grade of foreman, is drawn from the warmer parts of the world. Because they were at first paid in Panamanian silver, whose face value is worth only half that of American gold, they are known as the "silver roll men."
Of the thirty thousand and more common laborers,
