It is very saddening that such questions should circulate on the tongues of so many, and saddening that one cannot answer them as one would wish to be able to answer.

We have borrowed from certain countries the system of "baksheesh," and it has become a disease in which we have outdone the very nations we copied — as we do in everything we borrow. This "baksheesh" has become a pillar upon whose size, great or small, depends the servant's treatment of you everywhere.

We have advanced a little in some of our resorts; in others we are still backward. Enter a café and you will see fruit peels on its floor; listen to the people and you will hear loud voices and orders shouted by the man giving them as though he were master of the whole resort and not of the café alone. People eat in the streets, play in them, and throw their refuse into them, until they become such that one hates to walk there.

Is this encouraging to the summer visitor?

Where are the government information bureaus? Where are the sanatoriums for those who need rest and a measure of treatment? Where are the places set aside for children's play?

Where are the cinema houses in the resorts? Where are the theatrical performances organized

by companies? Where are the organized zajal and singing parties? A singer or a zajal poet gives a party: five hundred tickets are sold for a place that holds three hundred, and then begins the scramble for seats and the hurling of words — or of chairs. Does a single party ever begin at the hour announced? Or is the summer visitor forced to wait about an hour until the crowd is complete, or until the arrival of the person under whose patronage the party has been placed?

Does all this encourage summering in Lebanon? Where is the entertainment? Are we to be content with gambling for entertainment? Are its clubs to spread through the country, with no one daring to fight them because they are protected, even though the laws forbid them?

How does the sincere man among us feel when he sees all this? Does he not grieve? Does he not want everything in Lebanon to be good and complete? Do we not dream of the day when it will be the summer resort of the whole East? Of the day when it will rival the finest resorts in the world?

Those in authority among us, and the people themselves, must see these facts as they are and strive earnestly to raise the standard. All are responsible; and unless every Lebanese does his duty, our condition will never come right.