contrary, can doubt that more happiness enters into the life of most savages than into that of most civilised men? Not I, who have seen the Kaffirs, unblessed by our rule, and read Wallace's account of the Papuans in The Malay Archipelago, which, to show that I am not talking nonsense, I will here quote: "These forty black, naked, mop-headed savages seemed intoxicated with joy and excitement. Not one of them could remain still for a moment.... A few presents of tobacco made their eyes glisten; they would express their satisfaction by grins and shouts, by rolling on deck, or by a headlong leap overboard. Schoolboys on an unexpected holiday, Irishmen at a fair, or midshipmen on shore, would give but faint idea of the exuberant animal enjoyment of these people." The grown Papuan, therefore, is happier—so it struck Wallace—than the civilised schoolboy. It is a well-chosen point of comparison. We are not ashamed, most of us, to look back to our boyhood as to a state of high-tide happiness that, upon the whole, with a fluctuation or two not quite in favour of the intellect, has been receding ever since; but we kick at thinking savages happier than ourselves. Kick as we may, the Arab on his horse or his swift dromedary, the Lap on his snow-shoes, the Esquimaux in his canoe, the Indian chasing the buffalo—as he used to do—or the Pacific Islander surf-riding, carry it, I believe, as far as sheer happiness is concerned, high over the civilised man with all his greater powers of mind and his advanced morality.
