TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



37 



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 cat of the Lotus just once in his Ufe 

 has become too civiHsed : 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, j}er 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, Eicardo, 

 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 something to 



