IN THE SHETLANDS 255 
He should have restricted the proposition to 
civilised women. No word more terrible in the 
ears of a husband than “ Paris” on the lips of a wife. 
What worry, what anxiety, fear of adventurers, 
horror of waiters, hatred of hotels—what misery, in 
short, of almost every degree and kind, do not 
men go through who have to travel with their 
families! How they would all stay at home if they 
only could, and how glad they are—but this is a set- 
off—when they get back! Asa real fact—and every 
one must really know it—a very great number of so- 
called civilised pleasures are much more in the nature 
of pains—and acute ones—to those who are most 
truly civilised. The joys of the savage, however, are 
real joys. 
But comparisons of this sort are of little value, 
since they can only be drawn by those who belong to 
one of the two states, and not to both of them, and 
who, therefore, besides their prejudices, and that their 
wish is generally father to their thought, are of 
necessity unable to feel, or even to imagine, much of 
what is felt by members of the opposite one. Practi- 
cally, of course, it is always the civilised man who 
passes judgment, and in doing so he often adds cant 
and insincerity to the disabilities under which he 
labours. For whilst insisting to the utmost on all the 
pleasures—many of them empty and artificial—which 
belong to and represent the civilised state, he says 
little or nothing about certain elementary, and, there- 
fore, very real ones, which savages enjoy much more 
