nfluence 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
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 Her