When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to greet their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name--from the native standpoint--Riley has got off easily; I never tire of wondering what these people will call a white man. They seem to prefer the surname if it can be pronounced; if not, they try the given name, and Charley becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this fails, or if they take a dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a friend who, unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork all his life; and I know another man--a second-rate colonial of the intolerant kind--who goes blissfully about his business all unaware that hundreds of people know him by no other name than Pig Dung. No doubt you have noticed another thing down here--the deceptive simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the humblest speaks to the most powerful without any title of respect, with nothing corresponding to our "mister" or "sir." At first one is inclined to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy--the realization of the communist's dream--and there are other things which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more rigid social order exists--not of caste, but of classes. In the thousand or fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the islands the Polynesians have worked out a system of human relationships nearer the ultimate, perhaps, than our own idealists would have us believe. Wealth counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an islander to think of raising himself in a social way--where he is born he dies, and his children after him. On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of position, there is little to make the small man envious of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the same, he works as little or as much, and the relations between the two are of the pleasantest. There is a really charming lack of ostentation in these islands, where everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to pretend to be what one is not. That is at the root of it all--here is one place in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.