I imagine that those of our ancestors who first struggled up from the aboriginal slime used to sit occasionally in moody caucuses and talk of the good old days and perhaps envy the slower creatures which still drew their breath—such as that breath was—in the simple freedom of the mud. I know that at this very moment there are excursion steamers plying, as a certain wit says, from the foot of Main Street to the Blessed Islands of the Pacific, where the air never dreams of biting, where love lies for ever in the green shade, and where the noble savage runs wild and beautiful and good—but not too good—on the lovely land or gives himself ecstatically to the tumbling surf. And I have just been reading of a time in the eighteenth century—most amusing of centuries—when curiosity and sentiment and a kind of cosmic libido among Englishmen focussed themselves upon the State of Nature and found what they were looking for, first abroad in many quarters of the earth and then at home, where proper English explorations end. Little Britain, as Chauncey B. Tinker shows in a solid and jolly monograph called “Nature’s Simple Plan,” was waking up. During the sixties of the century Commodore Byron had come back with yarns about the giant Patagonians; Wallis had seen Tahiti and named it after the idyllic George III; Cartwright, having lived for years in Labrador, had brought live Eskimos to London; Bruce had studied deepest Abyssinia, and Captain Cook had begun to plough the most distant seas with many a home-keeping eye upon him. Not only did the poets hymn the delights of new paradises, but the more or less sober men of science took up the ardent chorus. Lord Monboddo claimed that the Golden Age still lingered in the South Seas and tickled all the wags with his talk about men with tails and about the cousinship of men and monkeys. Luxury was under fire: Dr. Johnson defended it, but Goldsmith wept to see it devastating villages and consequently to see the rural virtues leave the land. Rousseau, orator and laureate of the primitive, called the attention of mankind to Corsica, where liberty still survived and where it might be possible for some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. He himself began a constitution for the island, though he never finished it. Half Europe looked on encouragingly—but idly—while Pasquale Paoli led his Corsican revolt against Genoa. Boswell, visiting Rousseau while the philosopher was about his constitutional task, formed such a passion for the hardy island that he ventured into it, talked with Paoli, carried back to England a Corsican costume, and now and then conspicuously wore it while he tried to arouse the interest of Englishmen at large in the heroic little revolution. When Genoa gave Corsica to France and England let France keep it the lovers of liberty had a dreadful shock.