Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/672

656 we look for sympathy and kindness; they are positively unkind, their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. "Cet âge," wrote La Fontaine of childhood, "est sans pitié" The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a common one.

This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find one's self supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are in such circumstances capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make futile attempts to smash its head, much as she would, no doubt, have tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, I may as well add, was not really hurt by this shocking precocity of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a "pretense"—and the little girl grew up to be a kind-hearted woman.

Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child's dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of a child's cruelty. Young children are not, I think, often charged, even by the harshest of their accusers, deliberately with inflicting pain on their human companions.

At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention in a child's treatment of animals. Look, for example, at a little girl trying to get the cat from some hiding place. She grabs at its tail, receives formidable scratches, yet perseveres with something of a soldier's indifference to her own pains. Do we not here see evidences of a determination to plague, and of a delight in plaguing? Or watch a child chasing a fly on the window pane, and note the hard, doglike pertinacity with which he follows it up and at length pins and crushes it with his fingers.

The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that, whatever the cruelty of adults may be, children's so-called cruelty toward animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the child's impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. It is a manifestation of that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child's attachment to the lower animals.