home in his airy palace--any man who doesn't fraternise closely with
his kind when thus brought face to face with our primitive existence, I
don't envy him his stern and wild Caledonian ethics. The beach-comber
instinct should be strong in all sane minds. Or if that blunt way of
putting it perchance offend the weaker brethren, let us say rather, the
spirit of the Lotus-eaters. For the man who doesn't want to eat of the
Lotus just once in his life has become too civilised: the iron of the
Gradgrind era of universal competition and payment by results has
entered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a course of Egypt and
Tahiti.

Oh, yes; I know what you are going to object, and I grant it at once:
the influence of the Tropics is by no means an ascetic one. They, tend
rather to encourage a certain genial and friendly tolerance of all
possible human forms of society--even the lowest. They are essentially
democratic, not to say socialistic and revolutionary in tone. By
bringing us all down to the underlying verities of life, apart from its
conventions, they beget perhaps a somewhat hasty impatience of Court
dress and the Lord Chamberlain's regulations. But, _per contra_, they
teach us to feel that every man, whether black, brown, or white, is
very human, and every woman and child, if possible, even a trifle more
so. Wicked as it all is, there is yet in tropical political economy
more of the Gospel according to St. John, and less of Adam Smith,
Ricardo, and Malthus, than in any orthodox political economy prescribed
by examiners for the University of London. It is something to see a
world where ceaseless toil is not the necessary and inevitable lot of
all who don't pay income tax on a thousand a year, even if Board
schools are unknown and quadratic equations a vanishing quantity. It is
something to see a stick of sugar-cane protruding from the mouth of
every child, and oranges retailed at twelve for a ha'penny. It is