clock-hand turns, and the machine turns, and the earth turns the selfsame turning.

— And the labor law, you say, the labor law! What becomes of it, and how does it fare, amid such violations?

The road that leads to chaos is easy, and the door to breaking the law is wide. You can break the law as much as you please and remain within the law. Employ your work-ers — for instance — for a few months and lay them off for a few days, and the indemnity flies away and your head stays safe!.. Or set your workers a piece-quota of work that makes them work twelve hours with all gratitude. Thus with one stone you will have hit two rabbits — nay, three: you have doubled your profit, secured the worker his wage, and kept the law as well, and everyone is obliged.

And the first to be obliged is the worker. For the eight legal hours, the detestable ones, bring him in no more than two liras or two liras and a half — and, if they "split their belly," then three. Whereas he obtains the five liras if he works twelve hours. And five liras talk. And with five liras there is life, or some part of life, for him who wants life.

— Do not hold this mocking tone against me; I almost forget that this is a report. But criticism is a temperament and an easy matter; in every hand there is a pickaxe for it, and few are they who build.

Let us return to the figures.

3 - Nutrition

Unemployment, and chaos in work, and scanty wages, and living costs that rise and rise: so the earner of the two and three liras — that lucky man — is compelled to buy the uqiyya of meat at seventy, the kilo of brown bread at forty-five, and the squash and string beans and tomatoes and the rest of the vegetables at not less than fifty. How, then, is he to be nourished and live? Say rather that you see him scraping a subsistence and half-living.

Hungry one day, full the next!.. An example: in a school numbering

215 pupils, one of the Red Cross doctors could not count more than thirty on whose faces the signs of adequate nutrition appeared. And curiosity drove me to inquire further into what these children eat in their homes. I found that among the 63 families mentioned, 22 cook with meat once a week, 33 twice, and only eight families more than twice. And I marveled at the popularity of za'tar and oil for breakfast: it seems it opens the mind and quickens the thoughts!

And how many times have I asked one of these little ones: What did you have for supper last night? And he answers me with a certain detachment and a total simplicity: Last night we had no supper — the bread was held up at the bakery; that is what Mama said. Yes, that is what "Mama" says, to put her children off and to cheat her own misery.

— These are facts; I testify before God that they are the truth, and they are only part of the truth. For the Lebanese worker, as we know him, is proud of soul; he is ashamed of his poverty and hides it from your eye with much artifice. Nor is he stingy with himself and his children when his hand can reach: the worth of a thing, for him, is that it be there. He may have no supper for the night, and yet he will insist on appearing content with God's bounty, and on serving you coffee like other people.

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And now: I was asked for a report — is this that I have written a report? I dare not call it a report, nor anything other than a report. It is a few figures, and glimpses, and observations whose aim is neither condemnation nor judgment — we condemn no one — but to draw the attention of the responsible, and the responsible are all of us, and to lead them on to take notice that there is in Lebanon a problem of labor and a distress of workers which we cannot shut our eyes to; for it is our problem, and its distress ought to be our distress.

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