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.
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