If this dolefully helpless creature be lifted by the middle on a stick, its liquid contents are instantly separated, forming distended, high-pressure blobs at each end of the empty, flabby shrunken skin.  Though it suffers this experiment placidly, being incapable of the feeblest resistance, it has the primordial gift of care of itself.  Twists purposely made to test its degree of intelligence are artfullystraightened out, and the eagerness and hurry with which water is forced throughout empty parts show that life is both sweet and precious.  And what is the value of life to an animal of such homely organism and so few wants?  And under what charter of rights does it slink among the coral and weed affrighting God-fearing man under the cloak of his first subtle enemy?

CHAPTER V

THE TYRANNY OF CLOTHES

“Give the tinkers and cobblers their presents again and learn to live of yourself.”

Few enjoy a less sensational and more tranquil life than ours.  Weeks pass, and but for the visits of the kindly steamer, and the passing of others at intervals, there is naught of the great world seen or experienced.  A strange sail brings out the whole population, staring and curious.  Rare is the luxury of living when life is unconstrained, unfettered by conventionalities and the comic parade of the fashions.  The real significance of freedom here is realised.  What matters it that London decrees a crease down the trouser legs if those garments are but of well-bleached blue dungaree?  The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a light singlet is the only wear?  Of what trifling worth dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the clean, crisp, oatmeal-coloured sand.  Here is no fetish about clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink.  The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty.  He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base.  There may be degrees of baseness.  I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who have failed to catch even glimpses of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet afeared of opinion—­“that sour-breathed hag.”  How can a man with hoop-like collar, starched to board-like texture, cutting his jowl and sawing each side of his neck, be free?  He may rejoice because he is a very lord among creation, and has trousers shortened by turning up the ninth part of a hair after London vogue, and may be proud of his laws and legislature, and even of his legislators, but to the tyrannous edge of his collar he is a slave.  He can neither look this way nor that, nor up nor down, without being reminded that he has imposed upon himself an extra to the universal penalties of Adam.  One who lives in London tells me of the load of clothes he is compelled to wear