He should have restricted the proposition to civilised women. No word more terrible in the ears of a husband than "Paris" on the lips of a wife. What worry, what anxiety, fear of adventurers, horror of waiters, hatred of hotels—what misery, in short, of almost every degree and kind, do not men go through who have to travel with their families! How they would all stay at home if they only could, and how glad they are—but this is a set-off—when they get back! As a real fact—and every one must really know it—a very great number of so-called civilised pleasures are much more in the nature of pains—and acute ones—to those who are most truly civilised. The joys of the savage, however, are real joys.
But comparisons of this sort are of little value, since they can only be drawn by those who belong to one of the two states, and not to both of them, and who, therefore, besides their prejudices, and that their wish is generally father to their thought, are of necessity unable to feel, or even to imagine, much of what is felt by members of the opposite one. Practically, of course, it is always the civilised man who passes judgment, and in doing so he often adds cant and insincerity to the disabilities under which he labours. For whilst insisting to the utmost on all the pleasures—many of them empty and artificial—which belong to and represent the civilised state, he says little or nothing about certain elementary, and, therefore, very real ones, which savages enjoy much more
