power over wife and child.  To which we may add that war proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness, mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by fostering rape and licentiousness in general.  When Plutarch wrote that “the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love,” he meant, of course, lust.  In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the women of captured cities.  “Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you fall.  Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in the other”—­such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men given by Wahabi chiefs on the eve of battle.

IV.  CRUELTY

Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty.  It has been maintained that the notorious cruelty of the lower and war-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is an error.  Some of the instances cited under “Sentimental Murder” and “Sympathy” show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations smother all the family feelings.  Three or four more illustrations may be added here.  Burton says of the East Africans, that “when childhood is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts.”  The Bedouins are not compelled by law or custom to support their aged parents, and Burckhardt (156) came across such men whom their sons would have allowed to perish.  Among the Somals it frequently occurs that an old father is simply driven away and exposed to distress and starvation.  Nay, incredible cases are related of fathers being sold as slaves, or killed.  The African missionary, Moffat, one day came across an old woman who had been left to die within an enclosure.  He asked her why she had been thus deserted, and she replied: 

“I am old, you see, and no longer able to serve them [her grown children].  When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back as I used to do.”

V. MASCULINE SELFISHNESS

The South American Chiquitos, as Dobrizhoffer informs us (II., 264), used to kill the wife of a sick man, believing her to be the cause of his illness, and fancying that his recovery would follow her disappearance.  Fijians have been known to kill and eat their wives, when they had no other use for them.  Carl Bock (275) says of the Malays of Sumatra, that the men are extremely indolent and make the women their beasts of burden (as the lower races do in general).