something to know how the vast majority of the human race still live
and move and have their being, and to feel that after all their mode of
life, though lacking in Greek iambics, wallpapers, and the _Saturday
Review_, yet appeals in its own beach-comberish way to some of one's
inmost and deepest yearnings. The hibiscus that flames before the
wattled hut, the parrot that chatters from the green and golden
mango-tree, the lithe, healthy figures of the children in the stream,
are some compensation for the lack of London mud, London fog, and
London illustrations of practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs and
the Bermondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking the last
nail into the completed coffin of my own contention, but I believe
every right-minded man returns from the Tropics a good deal more of a
Communist than when he went there.

One word of explanation to prevent mistake. I am not myself, like
Kingsley or Wallace, an enthusiastic tropicist. On the contrary, viewed
as a place of permanent residence, I don't at all like the Tropics to
live in. I am pleading here only for their educational value, in small
doses. Spending two or three years there in the heyday of life is very
much like reading Herodotus--a thing one is glad one had once to do,
but one would never willingly do again for any money. We northern
creatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and by this time,
like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to our glacial environment. All
the more, therefore, is it a useful shaking-up for us to get
transported bodily from our cramped and poverty-stricken northern
slums, just once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South,
the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a frail exotic. We
come back to our chilly home among the fogs and bogs with wider
projects for the thawing down of the social ice-heap, and the
introduction of the bread-fruit-tree and the currant-bun-bush into the