Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/554

540 become a source of misery. What happens in this case? asks the philosopher whose treatment of the scientific aspect of duty we are following. "First the domestic irritations must be relatively great; for the actions of selfish children to one another and to their parents cause daily aggressions and squabbles. Second, when adult, such children are more likely than others to dissatisfy employers, alienate friends, and compromise the family by misbehavior, or even by crime. Third, beyond the sorrows thus brought on them, the parents of such children have eventually to bear the sorrows of neglected old age. The cruelty shown in extreme degrees by savages who leave the decrepit to starve is shown in a measure by all unsympathetic sons and daughters to their unsympathetic fathers and mothers; and these, in their latter days, suffer from transmitted callousness in proportion as they have been callous in the treatment of those around. Browning's versified story 'Halbert and Hob' typifies this truth."

We turn next from altruism in the family to altruism as an essential part of social conduct.

The relations within a family present on a small scale a picture of the relations among the members of a race or nation, as these in turn present a miniature of the relations between the different races and nations which form the human family. As men rise in the scale of being, they pass from the sense of duty within the family to the sense of duty between man and man throughout society, and thence—though as yet this development is very limited—to the sense of right between different races and nations. We have seen that undue care of self is self-injurious and eventually must be self-destructive in the family. There is a corresponding law for undue care of self in social relations, as there is (however persistently at present the vast majority of men overlook or fail to see the fact) for undue regard of self among the nations. We may mistakenly regard undue care of self in the body social as cleverness, aptitude for business, and so on; and we may mistakenly regard national selfishness as patriotism: but the process of evolution is as certainly working toward the elimination of one as of the other form of undue egoism.

The main condition of social welfare and of social progress is that the union which society implies shall work for the benefit of those associated. If the balance of effects resulting from association be evil, the body social must inevitably dissolve in the long run.

Now, by laws of greater or less severity the members of a race or nation may be compelled to recognize each others' claims. Or such recognition may be assured by the fear of retaliation if the claims of others are neglected. In such cases, however, the gain to each, or the egoistic advantage of association, is small. Enforced recognition of altruistic rights is in itself disagreeable. The more disagreeable it is the oftener will cases arise where the laws have to be called into operation (and their operation is by our supposition painful), or where