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亨德里克·威廉·房龙（Hendrik Willem van Loon，1882-1944），荷裔美国作家和历史学家。1911年获得德国慕尼黑大学博士学位。曾先后从事多种职业，并游历过世界很多地方，具有丰富的人生阅历。
房龙在写作方面取得了令人瞩目的成就，著有《房龙地理》、《人类的艺术》、《宽容》、《圣经的故事》等二十多部作品，先后在二十多个国家翻译出版。其作品文风清新，文笔睿智幽默，通俗易懂，趣味性强，内容往往涉及多个领域，包括音乐、绘画、历史、地理及科学知识，而真正使其著作历时不衰的原因是他看待问题的独特角度——他始终站在全人类的高度，以深厚的人文关怀，关注人类的生存和发展，形成自己独特的历史观和发展观，给后人以深深的启迪。
本文节选自《房龙地理》最后一章。
Day-dreaming over a map is really a very pleasant and instructive pastime. There lies 1)Rhodesia—a whole world by itself.
2)Cecil Rhodes was a promoter. He made a few people rich. He killed a great many natives. He turned brigand and started a little war of his own and lost. He turned statesman and started a big war and won. There are a great many monuments to murdered women and children which could bear the legend: “C.R. 3)sculpsit.”
A little further northward lies the Congo with its Stanleyville and Leopoldville and the unmarked graves of countless natives tortured to death because they were behind on their rubber quota or slow in bringing in elephant tusks.
The man-hunts with horses and dogs, organized to exterminate the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are rarely mentioned in the histories devoted to the early years of these distant territories.
Why go on?
I am merely repeating what everybody already knows.
There is very little use in sitting in high judgment upon the Errors of the Past. It is more profitable to collect our thoughts and devise ways and means by which we shall be able to avoid a few of the mistakes of the future. Well, the men and women of the type of 4)Reed and 5)Ross are there to show us the way. Sentimental meditations upon the glories of a problematic Utopia will get us nowhere. To say that since we have spent dozens of centuries “taking away” we must now spent other dozens of centuries “giving” will hardly solve the problem. Charity is as bad as brigandage. Charity is really just as unfair to the recipient as to the donor.
Nor would it benefit the Chinese or the 6)Javanese or the 7)Burmese if we should suddenly pack up all our little railroads and 8)flivvers and flying machines and remove our telephone booths and our filling stations. The machine has come to stay. The natives have adapted their lives to fast means of transportation and communication. They have fallen into the habit of calling on the doctor when the child develops 9)diphtheria rather than send grandmother to the 10)voodoo priest. When they want to visit their friends, they prefer a 11)jitney-bus to a ten-hour walk across a painful track.
And a world accustomed to bank-notes is not going back to the 12)pails of honey and the spoonfuls of salt of the ancient system of barter. For better or worse, this planet of ours has become one large, going 13)concern, and the date over the doorway is 1932, not 932 or 32 B.C.
There is, however, a solution, and the labors of Reed and Ross show us the general direction of the road we shall have to follow. For these two men neither “took” nor “gave”—they “co-operated”. They could never have done what they did without the assistance of thousands of others. Neither did they stamp out 14)malaria and 15)yellow fever for the exclusive benefit of the black man or the white man or the yellow man. Without regard to color or
16)creed they bestowed their blessings upon the whole of humanity. When 17)Goethals dug the Panama Canal, he was not thinking of either the Pacific or the Atlantic alone, nor of America alone, but of the world as a whole. When 18)Marconi invented his wireless, he did not stipulate, “Only Italian ships must be allowed to use the radio in case of disaster.”
You probably see what I am driving at.
No, I am not going to suggest the formation of a new society. That is not necessary. The problem will take care of itself. If it does not, there won’t be any problem in a couple of centuries because there won’t be any people left to worry about it.
We no longer live in a world the future of which we can leave to itself. That policy went out when steam and electricity came in and when 19)Patagonia and 20)Lapland, Boston and Han-kow became neighbors, able to 21)confer with each other in less than two minutes. We are no longer manufacturing goods for ourselves alone. Japan can make our matches cheaper than we can ever hope to do and the Argentine can grow enough wheat to keep the whole of Germany from starving and at much smaller cost. We no longer can offer the Chinese Coolie or the 22)Kaffir one-twentieth
of the wages we would pay a white man, because Moscow has a broadcasting station that carries very far and a staff of 23)polyglot announcers who inform the black and the yellow man that he is being cheated out of something that really belongs to him.
We are no longer able to 24)plunder and 25)filch and rob as heartily as our fathers did because our conscience won’t let us or if we ourselves should have happened to be born without that spiritual 26)compass, because the collective conscience of mankind has at last reached the point where it is beginning to get a first flickering suspicion that honesty and common decency are as inevitable in international affairs as they are in those of private citizens.
Thus far we have always lived as if we were a sort of accident—as if our stay on this planet was only a matter of years or at best of centuries. We have behaved with the indecent greed of passengers on a passenger-train who know that they will only have ten minutes for the three-course dinner to be served at the next halting-place.
Gradually we are beginning to realize that we not only have been here quite a long time but that we are going to stay here almost indefinitely. Why the hurry and why the rush? When you move to a town where you expect to spend the rest of your days, you plan for the future. So do your neighbors, the butchers and bakers and the doctors and 27)undertakers. If they didn’t, the whole place would be in such hopeless disorder that it would be uninhabitable in less than a week’s time. When you come to think of it, is there really such a very great difference between the world at large and your own native village? If there is any difference, it is one of quantity rather than quality. And that is all!
You will say that I have wandered all over the place, from 28)Kilimanjaro by way of Dr. Reed and Dr. Ross to planetary-planning for the future.
“But What,” as Alice might have asked, “is the use of a Geography without a little Travelling?”
看着一张地图遐想，的确是种非常愉快且有益的消遣。看，那儿是罗得西亚——一个自成一体的世界。其创立者之一——塞西
尔·罗得斯，他让少数人富有了，却杀害了许多土著居民。他像强盗般肆意掠夺，挑起过一次小战役，输了。后来他成了政治家，发起了一次大规模的战争，赢了。拜他所赐，无数妇女和儿童被害，他们的墓碑都可以刻上：“塞西尔·罗得斯谨立”了。
再往北是刚果的斯坦利维尔和利奥波德维尔两个城市，以及大量的无名孤坟，无数土著人因为没及时完成橡胶采集任务，又或者上缴象牙稍有迟缓而被折磨致死。
在澳大利亚和新西兰那片遥远的领土的早年历史中，殖民者骑马牵狗大规模追踪灭绝土著人的罪行很少被人提起。
难道还要继续讨论这些吗？
我只是在重复人人皆知的事实而已。
一味高姿态地批评以往的错误毫无意义，集中人类的智慧，避免重蹈覆辙才是明智之举。而给我们领路的正是像里德和罗斯这样的人。寄情于乌托邦社会的光环，殊不知其同样危机重重，这解决不了问题，而仅仅口头上说“我们已‘索取’了许多世纪，现在应该‘奉献’几个世纪”也无济于事。施舍和掠夺一样可恶，对捐献者和接受者都有失公平。
如果我们突然收回在中国、爪哇和缅甸修建的所有短程铁路，调回我们造的汽车、飞机，拆除我们盖的电话亭和加油站，对那里的人民毫无益处。整套系统既然建立起来了，就要保留，当地人已经习惯了快捷便利的交通和通讯。人们已经习惯在孩子患白喉病时去请医生看病，而不是让祖母去找巫婆；当他们想去看望朋友时，宁愿花点钱坐公车，也不想疲惫地走上10个小时。
一个已习惯以钞票解决问题的世界，是不会再回到过去一桶蜜、一匙盐的物物交换时代的。不管怎样，我们的地球已经成为一个不停向前的大企业，时间已经进入1932年，而不是932年，更不是公元前32年。
然而，还是有出路的，里德和罗斯的努力给我们指出了前行的大方向。他们两人既不是索取，也不是施舍，而是“合作”。如果没有数千民众的协助，他们决不可能取得那样的成就。他们消灭了疟疾和黄热病，并不是单纯为了黑人或白人或黄种人，而是使全人类从中受益，完全摒弃了种族和信仰偏见。戈索尔斯开凿巴拿马运河时，也并非只为了太平洋或大西洋或美洲的利益，而是为了全世界。马可尼发明无线电通讯时，也并未指定“只允许意大利船只在紧急情况下使用无线电”。
或许你们已经了解我的用意了。
不，我并非提议要建立一个新社会，这毫无必要。问题迟早会解决的。即使现在无法解决，几个世纪后也不会再有什么问题了，因为那时已没有幸存的人去担忧它了。
我们不再生活在一个只能听之任之的世界里。蒸汽和电力的使用，巴塔哥尼亚和拉普兰、波士顿和汉口这些地区成为邻居，远隔重洋的人用不了两分钟就能互相交谈，这些都宣告了“独善其身”已过时。我们制造生产不再只是为了自给自足。日本生产的火柴的价格大大低于我们美国火柴的价格，其成本之低是我们前所未料的；阿根廷能种出使整个德国免于饥饿的小麦，并且其成本比德国本国出产要低得多。我们也不可能再用白人工资二十分之一的钱雇用“中国苦力”或南非黑人了，因为莫斯科覆盖面极广的广播电台有精通多国语言的播音员会告诉他们，本应属于他们的许多东西被骗走了。
我们美国人决不能再像父辈那样，肆无忌惮地偷抢劫掠，因为良知不允许我们那样，即便是我们生来缺乏那种道德感，因为人类的整体良知已达到一定高度，开始隐约感觉到诚实和得体的行为举止无论在私人交往还是国际事务中都是不可或缺的。
长久以来，我们都如同地球上的匆匆过客，人生短短数十载（或至多过百年），似乎总是以一种偶然的方式生活着。我们的所作所为，就像一列客车上的贪婪食客，一心想着到下个中途停靠站只有十分钟时间来享用那有三道菜的正餐。
我们渐渐认识到，我们不仅在此生活了很久，而且还将继续无限期地生活下去。那为何要如此匆忙呢？如果你迁居到另一个小镇，并希望在那里度过余生，那你一定会计划未来。你的邻居们也是这样，无论他是屠夫、面包师、医生还是承办殡仪事务的人。否则，整个地方必会一片混乱，人们至少连一周都无法居住下去。当你想到这一点，你还会觉得整个世界与你所居住的村庄之间有如此之大的差别吗？如果有，那也只会是量的差别，而非质的不同。仅此而已！
你会说，我这章讲述的内容似乎散得不着边际，从乞力马扎罗山到里德和罗斯医生，又到描绘未来地球家园的蓝图，游得太远了。
“但，”爱丽丝或许要发问了，“如果不游走一下，谈地理又有什么意义呢？”
房龙在写作方面取得了令人瞩目的成就，著有《房龙地理》、《人类的艺术》、《宽容》、《圣经的故事》等二十多部作品，先后在二十多个国家翻译出版。其作品文风清新，文笔睿智幽默，通俗易懂，趣味性强，内容往往涉及多个领域，包括音乐、绘画、历史、地理及科学知识，而真正使其著作历时不衰的原因是他看待问题的独特角度——他始终站在全人类的高度，以深厚的人文关怀，关注人类的生存和发展，形成自己独特的历史观和发展观，给后人以深深的启迪。
本文节选自《房龙地理》最后一章。
Day-dreaming over a map is really a very pleasant and instructive pastime. There lies 1)Rhodesia—a whole world by itself.
2)Cecil Rhodes was a promoter. He made a few people rich. He killed a great many natives. He turned brigand and started a little war of his own and lost. He turned statesman and started a big war and won. There are a great many monuments to murdered women and children which could bear the legend: “C.R. 3)sculpsit.”
A little further northward lies the Congo with its Stanleyville and Leopoldville and the unmarked graves of countless natives tortured to death because they were behind on their rubber quota or slow in bringing in elephant tusks.
The man-hunts with horses and dogs, organized to exterminate the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are rarely mentioned in the histories devoted to the early years of these distant territories.
Why go on?
I am merely repeating what everybody already knows.
There is very little use in sitting in high judgment upon the Errors of the Past. It is more profitable to collect our thoughts and devise ways and means by which we shall be able to avoid a few of the mistakes of the future. Well, the men and women of the type of 4)Reed and 5)Ross are there to show us the way. Sentimental meditations upon the glories of a problematic Utopia will get us nowhere. To say that since we have spent dozens of centuries “taking away” we must now spent other dozens of centuries “giving” will hardly solve the problem. Charity is as bad as brigandage. Charity is really just as unfair to the recipient as to the donor.
Nor would it benefit the Chinese or the 6)Javanese or the 7)Burmese if we should suddenly pack up all our little railroads and 8)flivvers and flying machines and remove our telephone booths and our filling stations. The machine has come to stay. The natives have adapted their lives to fast means of transportation and communication. They have fallen into the habit of calling on the doctor when the child develops 9)diphtheria rather than send grandmother to the 10)voodoo priest. When they want to visit their friends, they prefer a 11)jitney-bus to a ten-hour walk across a painful track.
And a world accustomed to bank-notes is not going back to the 12)pails of honey and the spoonfuls of salt of the ancient system of barter. For better or worse, this planet of ours has become one large, going 13)concern, and the date over the doorway is 1932, not 932 or 32 B.C.
There is, however, a solution, and the labors of Reed and Ross show us the general direction of the road we shall have to follow. For these two men neither “took” nor “gave”—they “co-operated”. They could never have done what they did without the assistance of thousands of others. Neither did they stamp out 14)malaria and 15)yellow fever for the exclusive benefit of the black man or the white man or the yellow man. Without regard to color or
16)creed they bestowed their blessings upon the whole of humanity. When 17)Goethals dug the Panama Canal, he was not thinking of either the Pacific or the Atlantic alone, nor of America alone, but of the world as a whole. When 18)Marconi invented his wireless, he did not stipulate, “Only Italian ships must be allowed to use the radio in case of disaster.”
You probably see what I am driving at.
No, I am not going to suggest the formation of a new society. That is not necessary. The problem will take care of itself. If it does not, there won’t be any problem in a couple of centuries because there won’t be any people left to worry about it.
We no longer live in a world the future of which we can leave to itself. That policy went out when steam and electricity came in and when 19)Patagonia and 20)Lapland, Boston and Han-kow became neighbors, able to 21)confer with each other in less than two minutes. We are no longer manufacturing goods for ourselves alone. Japan can make our matches cheaper than we can ever hope to do and the Argentine can grow enough wheat to keep the whole of Germany from starving and at much smaller cost. We no longer can offer the Chinese Coolie or the 22)Kaffir one-twentieth
of the wages we would pay a white man, because Moscow has a broadcasting station that carries very far and a staff of 23)polyglot announcers who inform the black and the yellow man that he is being cheated out of something that really belongs to him.
We are no longer able to 24)plunder and 25)filch and rob as heartily as our fathers did because our conscience won’t let us or if we ourselves should have happened to be born without that spiritual 26)compass, because the collective conscience of mankind has at last reached the point where it is beginning to get a first flickering suspicion that honesty and common decency are as inevitable in international affairs as they are in those of private citizens.
Thus far we have always lived as if we were a sort of accident—as if our stay on this planet was only a matter of years or at best of centuries. We have behaved with the indecent greed of passengers on a passenger-train who know that they will only have ten minutes for the three-course dinner to be served at the next halting-place.
Gradually we are beginning to realize that we not only have been here quite a long time but that we are going to stay here almost indefinitely. Why the hurry and why the rush? When you move to a town where you expect to spend the rest of your days, you plan for the future. So do your neighbors, the butchers and bakers and the doctors and 27)undertakers. If they didn’t, the whole place would be in such hopeless disorder that it would be uninhabitable in less than a week’s time. When you come to think of it, is there really such a very great difference between the world at large and your own native village? If there is any difference, it is one of quantity rather than quality. And that is all!
You will say that I have wandered all over the place, from 28)Kilimanjaro by way of Dr. Reed and Dr. Ross to planetary-planning for the future.
“But What,” as Alice might have asked, “is the use of a Geography without a little Travelling?”
看着一张地图遐想，的确是种非常愉快且有益的消遣。看，那儿是罗得西亚——一个自成一体的世界。其创立者之一——塞西
尔·罗得斯，他让少数人富有了，却杀害了许多土著居民。他像强盗般肆意掠夺，挑起过一次小战役，输了。后来他成了政治家，发起了一次大规模的战争，赢了。拜他所赐，无数妇女和儿童被害，他们的墓碑都可以刻上：“塞西尔·罗得斯谨立”了。
再往北是刚果的斯坦利维尔和利奥波德维尔两个城市，以及大量的无名孤坟，无数土著人因为没及时完成橡胶采集任务，又或者上缴象牙稍有迟缓而被折磨致死。
在澳大利亚和新西兰那片遥远的领土的早年历史中，殖民者骑马牵狗大规模追踪灭绝土著人的罪行很少被人提起。
难道还要继续讨论这些吗？
我只是在重复人人皆知的事实而已。
一味高姿态地批评以往的错误毫无意义，集中人类的智慧，避免重蹈覆辙才是明智之举。而给我们领路的正是像里德和罗斯这样的人。寄情于乌托邦社会的光环，殊不知其同样危机重重，这解决不了问题，而仅仅口头上说“我们已‘索取’了许多世纪，现在应该‘奉献’几个世纪”也无济于事。施舍和掠夺一样可恶，对捐献者和接受者都有失公平。
如果我们突然收回在中国、爪哇和缅甸修建的所有短程铁路，调回我们造的汽车、飞机，拆除我们盖的电话亭和加油站，对那里的人民毫无益处。整套系统既然建立起来了，就要保留，当地人已经习惯了快捷便利的交通和通讯。人们已经习惯在孩子患白喉病时去请医生看病，而不是让祖母去找巫婆；当他们想去看望朋友时，宁愿花点钱坐公车，也不想疲惫地走上10个小时。
一个已习惯以钞票解决问题的世界，是不会再回到过去一桶蜜、一匙盐的物物交换时代的。不管怎样，我们的地球已经成为一个不停向前的大企业，时间已经进入1932年，而不是932年，更不是公元前32年。
然而，还是有出路的，里德和罗斯的努力给我们指出了前行的大方向。他们两人既不是索取，也不是施舍，而是“合作”。如果没有数千民众的协助，他们决不可能取得那样的成就。他们消灭了疟疾和黄热病，并不是单纯为了黑人或白人或黄种人，而是使全人类从中受益，完全摒弃了种族和信仰偏见。戈索尔斯开凿巴拿马运河时，也并非只为了太平洋或大西洋或美洲的利益，而是为了全世界。马可尼发明无线电通讯时，也并未指定“只允许意大利船只在紧急情况下使用无线电”。
或许你们已经了解我的用意了。
不，我并非提议要建立一个新社会，这毫无必要。问题迟早会解决的。即使现在无法解决，几个世纪后也不会再有什么问题了，因为那时已没有幸存的人去担忧它了。
我们不再生活在一个只能听之任之的世界里。蒸汽和电力的使用，巴塔哥尼亚和拉普兰、波士顿和汉口这些地区成为邻居，远隔重洋的人用不了两分钟就能互相交谈，这些都宣告了“独善其身”已过时。我们制造生产不再只是为了自给自足。日本生产的火柴的价格大大低于我们美国火柴的价格，其成本之低是我们前所未料的；阿根廷能种出使整个德国免于饥饿的小麦，并且其成本比德国本国出产要低得多。我们也不可能再用白人工资二十分之一的钱雇用“中国苦力”或南非黑人了，因为莫斯科覆盖面极广的广播电台有精通多国语言的播音员会告诉他们，本应属于他们的许多东西被骗走了。
我们美国人决不能再像父辈那样，肆无忌惮地偷抢劫掠，因为良知不允许我们那样，即便是我们生来缺乏那种道德感，因为人类的整体良知已达到一定高度，开始隐约感觉到诚实和得体的行为举止无论在私人交往还是国际事务中都是不可或缺的。
长久以来，我们都如同地球上的匆匆过客，人生短短数十载（或至多过百年），似乎总是以一种偶然的方式生活着。我们的所作所为，就像一列客车上的贪婪食客，一心想着到下个中途停靠站只有十分钟时间来享用那有三道菜的正餐。
我们渐渐认识到，我们不仅在此生活了很久，而且还将继续无限期地生活下去。那为何要如此匆忙呢？如果你迁居到另一个小镇，并希望在那里度过余生，那你一定会计划未来。你的邻居们也是这样，无论他是屠夫、面包师、医生还是承办殡仪事务的人。否则，整个地方必会一片混乱，人们至少连一周都无法居住下去。当你想到这一点，你还会觉得整个世界与你所居住的村庄之间有如此之大的差别吗？如果有，那也只会是量的差别，而非质的不同。仅此而已！
你会说，我这章讲述的内容似乎散得不着边际，从乞力马扎罗山到里德和罗斯医生，又到描绘未来地球家园的蓝图，游得太远了。
“但，”爱丽丝或许要发问了，“如果不游走一下，谈地理又有什么意义呢？”