wly, even under the
brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though
in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that
precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in
his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst
thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the
fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit
uninterruptedly for forty years. This is very immoral and wrong of the
ill-conditioned tree, because it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to
lie under the palms, all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea
occasionally, sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles
of Neaera's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in due time, when
he ought (according to European notions) to be killing himself with hard
work under a blazing sky, raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for
the immediate benefit of the white merchant, and the ultimate advantage
of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady industry and
perseverance, the good missionaries say; it doesn't induce the native to
feel that burning desire for Manchester piece-goods and the other
blessings of civilisation which ought properly to accompany the
propagation of the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in
the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing; you pick up the
ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you sell them at last for
illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece-goods merchant. Nothing
could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to
see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a coco-nut grove
in the South Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in
commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own
fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia leather chair at a club in
Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a
rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.

Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial
flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving coco-nut will not bring its nuts
to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in
due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of
coco-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in some
parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple of the
who