Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/820

800 quality in our boys. As one of the inevitable accompaniments of the savage state, we should expect to find heartlessness among children. "There can be no doubt," says Sir John Lubbock, perhaps the highest authority on the subject of the qualities of barbarians—"there can be no doubt that, as an almost universal rule, savages are cruel." Their moral code permits, if it does not inculcate, revenge and murder; and no stigma whatever is attached to a deed so unnatural to our eyes as maternal infanticide. The stories of inhumanity with which modern travelers fill their volumes, if true of the savages of to-day, will serve to characterize the savages of the past; and there is no fact better established than that the savages of times gone by numbered among themselves our own ancestors. During countless thousands of years, from the unknown date when the Miocene drifts covered the valleys of Western Europe, and buried the war-axes of the inhabitants who hunted beasts and men through the forest, to a time which, in comparison with that date, is as near as yesterday, the ancestors of the present civilized races roamed about as hungry, ill-clad savages. Their daily need of food was supplied by means of the suffering they inflicted upon cave-bears and musk-oxen, and sometimes they slew and ate their fellow-men, and cleft their bones for marrow. The shedding of blood, as the almost inseparable accompaniment of the satisfaction of the most imperious of all desires, hunger, must have become, according to the well-known principle of the association of ideas, in itself a pleasure. Like the savages of to-day, those fierce progenitors of ours must have delighted in the torture of captured enemies. Thus, during long ages, compassion was unknown, and it appears to have been lately acquired by the now dominant races. Indeed, even among so highly cultivated a people as the Romans, it remained almost unknown until comparatively recent times—say fifteen hundred years ago—in proof of which may be noted their heartless fondness for the bloody sports of the arena.

The emotion of pity, then, appeared late in the history of the race; and, in view of the law of our development, which carries us along the path our ancestors have trod, how can we expect our boys to be anything else but cruel? How far is it judicious to go, in trying to alter the natural course of a child's mental growth by imposing upon him ideas which in due course he will not share until later? This last question is inviting, but we will not go into its solution at present, contenting ourselves with observing that because a boy shows no compunction at giving pain to a captive bird, or calmly lacerates the feelings of a family of squirrels, merely to give himself a few soon-neglected pets, is no reason for expecting him to grow up a monster of cruelty. And we will further venture to suggest that much of the immorality of boys is a necessary consequence of their descent, as a corollary of which follows the aphorism of my witty friend, "A good boy is diseased."