There are few, even among those reckoned lawless, who will not keep faith with one who has the gift of getting near to them in spirit and making them feel that he is one of themselves.Thus Judge Lindsey of Denver has worked a revolution among the neglected boys of his city, by no other method than that of entering into tile same moral whole, becoming part of a "we"with them.He awakens their sense of honor, trusts it, and is almost never disappointed.When he wishes to send a boy to the reform school the latter promises to repair to the institution at a given time and invariably does so.Among tramps a similar sentiment prevails." It will be found," said a young man who had spent the summer among vagrants, " that if they are treated square they will do the same."The ideal of service likewise goes with the sense of unity.If there is a vital whole the right aim of individual activity can be no other than to serve that whole.And this is not so much a theory as a feeling that will exist wherever the whole is felt.It is a poor sort of an individual that does not feel the need to devote himself to the larger purposes of the group.In our society many feel this need in youth and express it on the playground who never succeed in realizing it among the less intimate relations of business or professional life.
All mankind acknowledges kindness as the law of right intercourse within a social group.By communion minds are fused into a sympathetic whole, each part of which tends to share the life of all the rest, so that kindness is a common joy, and harshness a common pain.It is the simplest, most attractive, and most diffused of human ideals.The golden rule springs directly from human nature.
Accordingly this ideal has been bound up with association in all past times and among all peoples: it was a matter of course that when men acted together in war, industry, devotion, sport, or what not, they formed a brotherhood or friendship.It is perhaps only in modern days, along with the great and sudden differentiation of activities, that feeling has failed to keep up, and the idea of cooperation without friendship has become familiar.
Mr.Westermarck, than whom there is no better authority on a question of this sort, has filled several chapters of his work on the Origin and Development of Moral Ideas with evidence of the universality of kindness and the kindly ideal.After showing at length that uncivilized people recognize the duty of kindness and support from mother to child, father to child, child to parent, and among brethren and kinsmen, he goes on to say: "But the duty of helping the needy and protecting those in danger goes beyond the limits of the family and the gens.Uncivilized peoples are, as a rule, described as kind toward members Of their own community or tribe.Between themselves charity is enjoined as a duty and generosity is praised as a virtue.Indeed their customs regarding mutual aid are often much more stringent than our own.
And this ap plies c`-cn to the lowest savages."Beginning with the Australians, he quotes the statement of Spencer and Gillen that their treatment of one another "is marked on the whole by considerable kindness, that is, of course, in the case of members of friendly groups, with every now and then the perpetration of acts of cruelty." Concerning the North American Indians he cites many writers.Catlin says " to their friends there are no people on earth that are more kind." Adair that "they are very kind and liberal to every one of their own tribe, even to the last morsel of food they enjoy"; also that Nature's school "teaches them the plain, easy rule, Do to others as you would be done by." Morgan reports that "among the Iroquois kindness to the orphan, hospitality to all, and a common brotherhood were among the dockines held up for acceptance by their religious instructors." An Iroquois " would surrender his dinner to feed the hungry, vacate his bed to refresh the weary, and give up his apparel to clothe the naked."And so Westermarck goes on, in the exhaustive way familiar to readers of his works, to show that like sentiments prevail the world over.Kropotkin has collected similar evidence in his Mutual Aid a Factor in Civilization.
The popular notion of savages as lacking in the gentler feelings is an error springing from the external, usually hostile, nature of our contact with them.Indeed, a state of things, such as is found in our own cities, where want and plenty exist side by side without the latter feeling any compulsion to relieve the former, is shocking and in comprehensible to many savages.
Ordinarily the ideal of kindness? in savage and civilized societies alike, applies only to those within the sympathetic group; the main difference between civilization and savagery, in this regard, being that under the former the group tends to enlarge.One reason for the restriction is that kindness is aroused by sympathy, and can have little life except as our imaginations are opened to the lives of others and they are made part of ourselves.Even the Christian church, as history shows, has for the most part inculcated kindness only to those within its own pale, or within a particular sect; and the modern ideal of a kindness embracing all humanity (modern at least so far as western nations are concerned) is connected with a growing understanding of the unity of the race.
