es of the
Tahitians in the devious path of enforced civilization.

Mrs. Lermontoff, in lamenting the Tahitian's degradation, physical
and spiritual, said that she was reminded 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
constant 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 anthropologists 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,
murder and wars, they had a higher system of philosophy than ours,
which admits hells, prisons, asylums, poor houses, bagnios, famines
and wars, and fails even in the recurrent periods of hard times to
provide for those stricken by their lash.

"But," said Lermontoff, "the Innuit, too, is corrupting under the
influence of trade, of alcohol, and the savage lust of the white
adventurer. He attained through many centuries, perhaps thousands
of years, of separation from other peoples, and without any of the
softening teachings of Christianity, a Jesus-like code and practice,
which the custodians of Christianity have utterly failed to impress
on the millions of their normal adherents."

I looked out upon the reef where the waves gleamed faintly, upon the
scintillating nearer waters of the lagoon, and upon us, barefooted,
and clothed but for decency, and I had to jolt my brain to do justice
to the furred and booted Eskimo in his igloo of ice. The difference
in surroundings was so opposite that I could barely picture his
atmosphere climatological and moral. I led the conversation back to
their situation in Vaieri.

He had planted his vanilla-vines on