EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED

“The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded manner,” says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on both sides of the Continent.  The Canadians, according to Lalemant (Jesuit Relations, IV., 199),

“kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old that they can walk no longer, thinking that they are thus doing them a good service; for otherwise they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they have become unable to follow others when they change their location.”

Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages:  they are destroyed or left to perish.  Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight different races of savages, and found it denied of only one.  Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding: 

“Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness to the aged:  on the contrary, probably because in villages the means of more abundant subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people appeared to be treated with attention.”

But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism.  If one of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not deserve that name.  It would be superfluous to make this remark were it not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness.  There is a whole volume of philosophy in Bates’s remark (293) concerning Brazilian Indians:  “The good-fellowship of our Cucamas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters.”  The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter (V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the Canadian Indians.  He is just to the point of generosity, but he is compelled to end with these words:  “And yet I would not dare to assert that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage.  They have nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view.”

BIRTH OF SYMPATHY