"Voyage of Curiosity"

Four buxom wives and 296 concubines have been too many--until lately--for slim, bashful Sidi Mohammed, 19-year-old puppet-Sultan of French Morocco. Last week Paris looked on Sidi with new respect. For one thing Sidi's chin is sprouting. For another since he left Morocco two of the stripling-Sultan's wives have become mothers, and on dit a concubine too. Admiring Parisians cheered ce brave petit papa! Was not the eldest of his ably begotten babes a manchild, born Crown Prince of Morocco?

Sultan Sidi on his last visit to Paris a year ago seemed almost a child himself. He had heard of something called a circus. Could he see a circus? Obligingly His Highness's mentors--the French Colonial Office--arranged a special matinee at the famed Cirque d'Hiver. Dancing-eyed, Sultan Sidi watched clowns cavort, clapped hands at jibbering monkeys, and followed with rapt gaze a troop of blonde wenches adept at riding horses bareback. Enthused, he was heard to shout to his Grand Vizier:

"I want a circus every afternoon when we get back to Fez! Get me a lot of clowns and dancing dogs, and some of those big women that can ride standing on their heads."

The circus, as a matter of fact, was never hired. Within the year Sultan Sidi has put away all such childish things. He clapped no clowns in Paris last week, went instead to several sound-cinemas, his first. Well coached, he spoke of talkies as "the eighth Art," prophesied wisely that they will improve.

Of course the real ruler of Morocco is French Resident General Marcel Lucien Saint, tactful but inflexible dictator to the puppet-Sultan. It is no accident that M. Saint is just now in France "on leave." Astute, he arranged that Sultan Sidi should motor up from the Riviera to Paris, stopping repeatedly on the way to inspect French factories in such major industrial cities as Lyons. For a nineteen-year-old such inspections are bound to be boring. But M. Saint was implacable. Sultan Sidi, at the formative stage of his manhood, must be stamped with an indelible impression of the might and industrial potency of France.

Scarcely realized by many a U. S. citizen is the fact that the French colonial empire is over half again as large as the 48 U. S. states, with a staggering population of almost 60,000,000 (mostly natives, of course). Morocco harbors only four of these teeming millions, yet even Sultan Sidi's little realm absorbed in 1927 $3,249,000 of direct imports from the U. S. "I shall soon return to Fez," said docile Sidi last week. "On my voyage of curiosity I have obtained the latest ideas of the modern industrial world."