Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/51

Rh intimate with the folk of our own countryside. Is it not the fact that unselfishness in regard to the sharing of the necessaries of life is characteristic of those who find them most difficult to come by? The poor are by no means the least 'rich towards God.' At any rate, if poverty sometimes hardens, wealth, especially sudden wealth, can harden too, causing arrogance, boastfulness, and the bullying temper. 'A proud look, a lying tongue, and the shedding of innocent blood'—these go together.

I am far from suggesting, however, that human nature can afford to dispense with a strain of hardness altogether. The individual needs grit; society needs the legal fibre. This is the point that I was trying to make in my last address to this Society: namely, that a certain fighting quality forms an essential ingredient in all true manliness; though it is only by an aberration and perversion of the genuine impulse that it gives rise to savagery in the damnatory sense of the word. But to-night I am seeking rather to maintain the converse proposition, that there is likewise a gentle element in the natural man which stands to the hard element in a normal relation of superiority.

Let me take as a test case the development of the 'will for power' among the simpler peoples. If it appear that it is on the whole a will to exert power over other men, whereby they may become the slaves of the superman, who in this domination and exploitation of the rest tastes the highest value that life affords, then it would seem that the hard element in human nature is the master-principle. But if it turn out, on the contrary, that it is mainly a will to exert power over self, whereby a spiritual experience, indirectly involving a disposition towards a life of social service, may be attained for its own sake, then, so far as a merely anthropological proof can take us, the presumption is that the gentle element has the better natural right to rule.

Now it cannot be denied that the savage is at one with his civilized brother in wishing to enjoy material blessings