necessary that certain commitments be entered into, whereby the government availing itself of the provisions of such a plan would undertake to effect the necessary economies in governmental administration and to take such other steps as might be required to bring about an equilibrium in its international balance of payments.

It has been well observed that the obligation of keeping the gold standard in force and maintaining the financial equilibrium of the world devolves upon the creditor nations. The events which have taken place during the last few years are not peculiar to this day and age. They have occurred in the past and will recur in the future unless plans are formulated to meet such conditions and to avoid their consequences before they have had an opportunity to take root. The existing system has proved impotent in the past, and it becomes increasingly evident that if a repetition of these unfortunate events is to be avoided, they shall be avoided only through a plan of international cooperative action, either continental in scope or world-wide in character. Such a plan would prove beneficial to the debtor as well as to the creditor. In the debtor country, it would contribute immeasurably to the maintenance of the nation's economic equilibrium, the preservation of national credit and the parity of the currency, and the maintenance of the nation's credit in the eyes of the world. In the creditor country, its nationals who might hold the securities of the debtor government would be assured of the receipt of the interest payments due thereon; and its exporters might confidently expect a continuation of a free market for the disposal of their merchandise.

MARKETING IN LIMA'

I. THE CENTRAL MARKET

HE Far East and the Sons of the Sun; Buddha, Confucius, Viracocha, Jehovah, and Mahomet; a hundred creeds and a hundred races, rub elbows daily in the Central Market. It is the food emporium of Lima and the crossroads of the world in one. It is the Lima of a hundred years ago selling to the Lima of the twentieth century the foodstuffs and the fabrics of all the nations. You

can not claim to know Lima or what a bargain is, unless you have gone shopping in the Central Market. And, incidentally, you don't know what are Lima's favorite foods, unless you have sampled some of the strange dishes offered in the dozens of little restaurants which open out from all sides of this Tower of Babel.

Food is the principal raison d'être of the Central Market. It is a meat, fish, vegetable, butter and eggs, poultry, and flower market combined; and it is all too small for its many activities. In fact, the market itself begins a block or more away in all directions from the main building. If you approach it from the Plateros de San Pedro, it begins with a literary flavor. Along the curbstones and overlapping into the road are piles of second and third and tenth. hand books and magazines. A few yards farther on the first wavelets of the inflowing tide of food are encountered-timid little heaps of peppers and Indian corn, bananas, and potatoes, presided over by Indian women. Presently you are wading up to your knees in a sea. of vegetables and fruits which, as the market building itself is reached, have long since overflowed from the sidewalks into the fairway until only the narrowest and most perilous passage is left for the traffic of carts and lorries and taxicabs. From whatever direction the approach is made, the same experience is obtained. One street may be devoted mainly to turkeys and poultry, another to potatoes and camotes (sweetpotatoes), a third to mammoth watermelons and pawpaws. But there is no hard-and-fast uniformity. The housekeeper is liable to encounter all she needs for the evening meal, from the hors d'oeuvres and the soup to the savory and sweet (ab ovo usque ad mala, as we learned to say at school), upon the same sidewalk. And incidentally, if she is a linguist, she may talk in Spanish, Quechua, Aymará, Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic, and probably find some one to understand her wants.

'From "West Coast Leader," Lima, May 3, 1932.

PRINCIPAL CENTERS OF FOOD PRODUCTION IN PERU The panels above and at right of map show the chief food products of Peru, by Departments, as follows: 1. Piura: Cacao, cereals, goats. 2. Lambayeque: Rice, fruit, sugar, goats. 3. Cajamarca: Cereals, cacao, cattle. 4. Libertad: Sugar, rice, cereals, cattle. 5. Ancash: Poultry, cereals, eggs, hogs. 6. Junin, Huanuco, and Huancavelica: Coffee, potatoes, cattle, sheep, cheese, butter, poultry, cereals, fruit. 7. Ica: Red and white wine, fruit, dried vegetables. 8. Ayacucho: Cattle. 9. Cuzco: Cacao, coffee, dried meat, corn, wheat, cheese, butter. 10. Arequipa and Puno: Mineral waters, dried meat, fruit, wine, olives, red peppers, coffee. 11. Moquegua: Olives, wine, cereals, fruit. 12. Tacna: Vegetables and fruit.

The Central Market may be heard long before it is reached or smelled. . . . From all sides hundreds of voices proclaim, in different pitches but full-lunged, the price and the merits of some article of food. From the same vantage point it may also be noticed that, in the midst of all this apparent confusion, there is a sort of orderly disorder which guides the purchaser and controls the vendors. The butchers' stalls, with the prime meats segregated from those of third quality, have their allotted place. The fishwives are separate from, though near to, the purveyors of live rabbits and pigeons and guinea pigs. The vegetables may overlap into the fruits, but flowers and artificial wreaths suffer no interlopers. There is one place in which to buy bread, and another tea or coffee, and a third where you may purchase a wicker basket or a paper bag from a selection of sizes in which to carry away the morning's marketing. And here, there, and everywhere are tables at which you may sit and rest and eat a plate of conchitas (clams) or drink a glass of chicha. Marketing is hungry and thirsty work. But wherever you go, whether you are buying meat or fruit or fish, always at your elbow is some itinerant child seeking to sell you something-it may be a paper bag, a comb, a pair of earrings, a looking glass. If you want none of these things, he has other equally attractive articles at equally attractive prices which lead to the delusion that Lima is a cheap place in which to live. The delusion is heightened by the yards upon yards of cheap cotton goods from Manchester and Tokio, by the hundreds of pairs of shoes from Argentina and Chile, overalls from Massachusetts, cutlery from Solingen, tinware from Birmingham, jewelry from Germany, all the shoddy from all the markets of the world, hung out for sale upon the stalls which line the inner walls of the building. Every other market place in Lima or the suburbs is a replica in miniature of the Central Market. The municipality maintains a strict vigilance over all meats and vegetables; its uniformed inspectors are on the alert from the opening to the closing hour.

. . .

There is another impression which the stranger visiting Lima for the first time can not fail to carry away with him. Peru imports certain articles of prime necessity which, with proper organization, might well be grown within her borders. Nevertheless, if war should close the world's granaries, Peru would not starve. She could feed herself, and feed herself well, on the harvests of her own fields and the cattle of her own hills.

II. ITINERANT VENDORS AND STREET CRIES

Although much that is picturesque is passing away, the street cries of Lima, unlike those of old London, still survive. Some of those cries are common to all cities. At certain hours of the day, for instance, a great surge of sound sweeps through the streets in a steady