CHAPTER XIII.
HUMANITY.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The wanton disposition of young children, like the mischievousness of our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome [[161]]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as a protest against acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number of babuinos hasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young [[162]]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.
That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a young Roussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”
“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and [[163]]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.
A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the [[164]]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.