438 MYSTIC ISLES 



of the shadow that may be inherent in our growth, but 

 in any event has been made certain by machinery and 

 business control of world ethics." 



They were believers in the doctrines of Leo Tolstoi, 

 and especially in non-resistance, and the possessing little 

 or no property to encumber their free souls. In the 

 village they had become the guides of the Tahitians in 

 the devious path of enforced civilization. 



Mrs. Lermontoff, in lamenting the Tahitian's degra- 

 dation, physical and spii'itual, said that she was re- 

 minded always of the Innuit, the Eskimo, among whom 

 she and her husband had passed several years. 



"They are the most ethical, the most moral, the most 

 communal people I know of," she commented. "They 

 have a quality of soul higher than that of any other race, 

 a quality reached by their slow development and con- 

 stant struggle. I imagine they went through a terrible 

 ordeal in the more temperate zones farther south before 

 they consented to be pushed into the frozen lands of 

 Canada, and then, following the caribou in the summer, 

 to mush to the Arctic sea. There, while they had to 

 change their habits, clothing and food, to learn to live on 

 the seal and the bear and the caribou in the midst of ice 

 and snow, they were spared for thousands of years the 

 diseases and complexes of civilization, and reached a 

 culture which is more worth while than ours." 



I was skeptical, but she quoted several eminent an- 

 thropologists to support her statement that the Eskimo 

 were better developed mentally than other people, and 

 that in simplicity of life, honesty, generosity, provision 

 for the young and the old, in absence of brutality, mur- 

 der and wars, they had a higher system of philosophy 



