Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/537

Rh together the members of an economic group, sometimes prompts men to abide by their promises and agreements, and helps even to keep men to the due performance of their appointed work. Indeed the functions of physician, nurse, priest or teacher can hardly be discharged, if some human kindness be not mingled with the services.

But after the fullest and frankest recognition has been given to the role actually played by spontaneous altruism, nothing can be clearer than its utter inadequacy to the needs of a modern society. The success of social organization depends on each man, whether watched or unwatched, sticking to his appropriate work and interfering with no one else in his work. Each in doing his specialized task must trust that others will do certain things, at certain times, in certain ways, and will forbear from certain other things. This trust would be sadly misplaced, if affection and impulse were all that could be relied upon. The degree of smoothness we actually attain, in working the complicated organization of today, is due to something else. Moreover the tasks imposed on different individuals are so unlike in respect to hardship, and the rewards granted are so unequal, that sympathy is quite as likely to dissolve as to strengthen the social order. The very name, "fellow-feeling" suggests how repugnant to it is extreme disparity of condition.

Looking from above, sympathy appears as compassion, the impulse to help another by denying one's self. Looking from below, it appears as envy, the impulse to relieve one's distress by sharing in the good fortune of another. In either case, extreme unlikeness of condition inspires feelings which tend to lessen or remove that unlikeness. But the differentiating group is riddled with inequality, so that, did it trust itself to spontaneous feelings, apart from law and morality, it would be ground to powder between compassion and envy as between the upper and the nether millstone. It is law and morality that make the solid bony framework of social order; sympathy is but the connective tissue. Even if kindness might conceivably restrain the well-to-do from taking the house of the widow, the heritage of