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CHAPTER XI.

SOCIAL SYMPATHY IN MANKIND.

THE WIDENING OF SYMPATHY.

AMONG men the same general trend of progress continues, but greatly quickened, inasmuch as the social sympathies have now an effect predominating over all others in deciding which of many competing races is to emerge from the struggle. Thus it happens that changes in sympathetic temperament, which in the lower animals have required long and immemorial ages, are in mankind completed on a vastly greater scale in a few thousand years. In this chapter, therefore, and in the following, I shall deal with the upward growth of these sympathies in man, entering into a degree of detail, which, though still leaving the story but a sketch, may be in some measure proportional to the increased importance of the subject, and also in some sort of accordance with the greater wealth of materials now pressing upon us.

But in its essence the story is still the same; social sympathy still takes its rise in family life; still do we see the more specially preservative feelings towards child and wife spreading outward to embrace a wider area. They who love a child because it is their own may have by far their warmest fervour of devotion only for their own offspring, yet they will experience a certain predisposition to tenderness towards children in general; and this feeling indeed overflows the bounds of the species, giving rise to a certain compassionateness towards the young of all animals, so that we are conscious, just as the finer of the lower animals themselves are, of a peculiar melting emotion before the lamb, the duckling, the kitten, or the kid. Observe how the calf or

the puppy is fondled when the mature animal is neglected; or watch the delighted crowd which in a zoological collection gathers round the baby leopards or the new-born bear, and we shall understand how the primal sympathy of parental care has spread itself out in a general sympathy for tender years. Just as the little girl, when she lavishes untold affection on her doll of rags, is witnessing to the deepest treasures of inherent womanly nature, so does the whole race, by its mood of melting softness before all that is young, indicate how ineradicable has become the general operation of this emotion once so exclusive.

And the conjugal sentiment also tends to spread beyond the family limit, so that, apart from any trace of sensual feeling, men are touched by the sight of female beauty, and moved to generous emotion by the sight of a sex feebler than their own. When a man rises and yields to a woman, an utter stranger, his seat in train or tram-car; when he feels, as he sees a woman toiling at some coarse and unwomanly task, that he would like to set her free and himself undertake the drudgery; when, within the doomed vessel whose bulwarks are almost awash, he willingly helps to fill the last boat with the women, though fully realising that in a few minutes he himself will in consequence be a drifting corpse in the deep sea, in such cases he proclaims how, after a long story of slow development, that sympathy which was originally the finer side of mere sexual feeling has spread and spread till at last it extends to every one that bears the shape of a woman.

PRESERVATIVE VALUE OF SOCIAL SYMPATHY.

But while the social sympathies thus derive part of their primitive strength from the widening of other sympathies, they are in themselves also of sufficient preservative value to secure a growth of their own once a start is given to them. In a community of primitive form, where violent death awaits a man on so many hands, it is not only a deep comfort, but a means of safety to have a warm friend, ever true and trusty. Sir Richard Burton describes how among the negro races,

wherein the capacity of maintaining law and order is but little developed, there is a "passion for sociality" which drives them into the "saré" or oath of brotherhood. (Lake Regions, i., 102.) Little describes this as being very common in Madagascar. "It consists of a solemn vow of eternal friendship and mutual obligation, sealed by the act of solemnly partaking of each other's blood by the two contracting parties, by which act they become brothers." Robertson Smith describes it as a well-known custom of the Arabs, and it is still very frequent among the less settled of the Malay races. In history we often have occasion to note the effects of such unions. A somewhat similar feeling of brotherhood gave to Sparta her early predominance in Greece; while Thebes owed her short-lived supremacy to the brother-oath that bound her Sacred Band in bonds of indissoluble fellowship. Through all the turmoil of the early middle ages, it is easy to perceive the sledge-hammer effect produced by a chief who had for the nucleus of his army a band of "gesidhs" sworn to attend him, to defend him, and never to survive him; and Mahomet's followers altered the history of the world by the power of these sworn brotherhoods.

On the contrary, disunion has always been fatal. Could the Highlanders of Scotland have added to their reckless valour a capacity for solid union under one great chief, the part they were to play in the history of the British Isles would have been a very different one, and a much greater share of wealth and power and of consequent populousness might have drifted north. But, as Macaulay says (History of England, iv., 353, Cab. ed.), their armies could perform “incredible feats of arms," yet their most brilliant victories were always followed "by the triumph of the conquered and the submission of the conquerors," for the conquered were united, and the conquerors never were. "Local jealousies and local interests" dissolved the ill-cemented union of unsympathetic tribes.

The brilliant history of Rome is one long story of the triumph of union over disunion. Dr. Hearn in a suggestive passage of his Aryan Household (p. 265) says that "the folly of the different nations who allowed Rome to deal with them

one by one has been the subject of much sterile wonder. These barbarous tribes could no more combine for any great operation than they could make a chemical analysis. They were mentally and morally unequal to the task. Herodotus says of the Thracians that if they had but one head, or could agree among themselves, they would far surpass all other nations. But Thrace was not a country in the sense in which we use the term. It was the locality in which some fifty independent tribes were settled, every one of them in its structure and its social life having its own individual existence. and being complete after its kind."

The whole course of history is in its main features the emergence of the type that is capable of union, the subjugation, absorption, or often the total destruction of types less capable of consolidation; in other words, the emergence of the social as against the unsocial races in the long struggle for existence. One of the most suggestive chapters of the kind is that wherein Macchiavelli describes how Florence, during ten years of her peaceful harmony, all her factions reconciled, all her internal strifes composed, marched on to greatness and prosperity. "It is not possible to imagine," he says, “the power of authority which Florence in a short time acquired." (History of Florence, bk. ii., chap. ii.) But after these ten years, she became afflicted anew with the bitter discords of her citizens, and her greatness immediately declined. The whole history of the Italian peninsula from first to last is one long exposition of the truth that "Union is Strength," or in other words, when we apply the principle to living men, strong social sympathies are the most profitable means of progress that any nation can possess.

Within the tribe itself there are always forces at work which slowly tend to weed out the less social and leave the more social natures. They who think that the great strong bully is necessarily the surviving type in savage life are in a large measure mistaken. Such a man has predominance for a time, and he slaughters off other bullies who interfere with him or challenge his supremacy, but ere long he succumbs himself to the strength or fraud of some rival. Among ourselves the boxing championship does not adorn any individual for

more than a few years. Once he passes the meridian of his strength, some other at the age of maximum vigour wrests the belt from him. But in savage life such a fall most probably implies also death, and he who reads the story of barbarian conquerors from the fourth to the eighth centuries will notice how rarely the mere warrior type preserves his command and his life for more than a few years, ere he falls a victim directly or indirectly to his own love of violence.

In such a book as that wherein Captain Musters describes minutely the incidents of a twelvemonth spent within a Patagonian tribe, we see how steadily the big, powerful, but unamiable fellow disappears. One after another, as the year rolls by, the loud and arrogant braves descend to their blood-stained tombs, while a steadier control lies with him who is able to secure a following. He may often be such as we might not admire, but some of the qualities that make men liked must be his to secure the requisite devotion from others. Catlin speaks (i., 19) of the constant killing off among the Indian tribes of the quarrelsome, and I find references to several negro races that have existed within recent times, but which started their own ruin by internecine wars and slaughters, and were eventually exterminated or absorbed by their neighbours. "Savages," says Robertson Smith of the early Arabs (Kinship, p. 127), "well know the danger of quarrels within the tribe," and the records of the Malays during the present century tell of peoples who by reason of their innate ferocity have been wiped from the face of the earth.

Seeing then that man is subject in his own degree to the necessities of the struggle for existence, three being born where only one can survive, the type which has been emergent all along the line is the one that has, if other things were fairly equal, been most richly endowed with social sympathies, and the progress of mankind has in consequence been one of constantly increasing power of union. Hunter, speaking of the early peoples of India (p. 97), says that "the race progressed always from loose confederacies of tribes into several well-knit nations". These united again, until India reached her palmiest days, when all were cemented, even though badly cemented, into the great Mogul Empire. So do