POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA	297
taining shower baths and running water and electric
light, with a wireless station, tennis courts and a
bathing pool, and a new neat hospital in the middle
of plantations which smell all the day through of
latex, as it drips into little cups tied beneath incisions
in the trunks. They, more than the English or the
French, are the official Enemy, and no story of
whipping post, smuggled arms or burnt villages is
too wild to be circulated and believed among
Liberians of both parties.
Politics
We arrived in Monrovia when the political cam-
paign was getting under way; those politicians
embracing each other on the jetty were only a fore-
taste of the excitement. For the curious thing about
a Liberian election campaign, which goes on for
more than two months if there's enough money in
hand, is that, although the result is always a fore-
gone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and
the speeches and the pamphlets matter. The Govern-
ment prints the ballot papers, the Government owns
both the newspapers, the Government polices the
polling booths, but no one assumes beforehand that
the Government will win, or if it is the turn of the
Opposition, the Opposition. A curious fiction is kept
up even among die foreign representatives. There
are excited conversations at dinner parties; bets are
always on the point of being laid. But the fiction,
of course, stops short of losing money. Perhaps to an
American, who is used to his state elections, the
conditions seem less odd.