Responsibility

Peaceful Life In The

South Seas

I A Question of Individual Responsibility

LIVING in various pleasant but isolated places in the South Seas are men of birth, education, and culture, who have left the busier countries in disgust, and settled down to a simple life in the sunshine, far from the worries of a restless and often turbulent world.

The position and outlook of these men sometimes are criticised. It has been said of them that they are “deserters”; but the expatriates reply fiercely that they surely are free to withdraw from the world of affairs if it is not to their liking—they are not responsible for the modern conditions which make life in Europe and America intolerable for so many of them.

Discussing this subject in a personal letter, a friend in America says: “The expatriates hold that what we call our ‘civilisation’ is a farce, that society is rotten, and so on—with all of which I heartily agree. But I think that there is this to be said. We ourselves have made this ‘civilisation’; we ourselves are this society. Thus upon each one of us lies an individual responsibility in respect of it.

If we flee it all, are we not somewhat derelict to that responsibility? I think we are. Moreover, I think that an additional share of responsibility rests upon men of the outstanding ability of some of the fellows we meet in the South Seas and who, instead of cavilling at the world, might be able to do a great deal towards restoring it to sanity and decency.”

It is reminiscent of the harsh views of old Covenanters, this doctrine of individual responsibility. Modern opinion rejects it; and so it is charged against modern society by some philosophers that the world is drifting steadily towards those conditions of luxury, indifference and sloth which destroyed many great civilisations long before the Christian era.

One supposes it all boils down to the question of whether, having been born into a world which we did not choose, under conditions in which we had no voice, we are free to arrange our lives as we wish.

The circumstances of life in “highly civilised” communities —the crash and clatter of modern transport, the ghastly mockery of the thing we call democracv, the ruthlessness and cruelty of “big busi ness” the sickening hypocrisy of “social uplift”—become an intolerable horror to sensitive and imaginative people; and, whenever they can, they seek quiet and isolated places, where life at least is simpler and cleaner.

Have we the right to say to such people that they should abandon their deliberately chosen retreats, and return to the busier world, and apply themselves to the utterly hopeless task of trying to make humanity a little less inhuman?—R.W.R.

Monsieur Fernand Legras, editor of Le Bulletin du Commerce, a leading news paper of New Caledonia, paid a short visit to Australia in July. He took the opportunity while in Sydney of renewing old Islands acquaintances and seeking material for articles for his journal. M.

Legras’ last visit to the Commonwealth was during the Great War, when he passed through Sydney en route to France with the New Caledonian contingent.