Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the
other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an
eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures.
Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats
over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity
for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of
humanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro
"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or
compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal,
writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly
provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a
number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children,
stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor
mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and
roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put
it out of its misery."
Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he
witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on
the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with
knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal
in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible
cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill
the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason
than because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender,"
Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in every
sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds
that of any wild beast of the desert." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol.
XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted by
the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning of
the West_ (I., 95):
"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not
one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes
torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look
another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred
stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints
chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be
mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and
customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially
when women are the victims."
In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historian
Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward
prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same
fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the
Iroquois (285) that
"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace,
and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they
meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to
infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side.
Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and
laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that
rose from the blazing dwellings."
On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.
Among their prisoners
"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who
had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the
first halt, their captors took the infants from them,
tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly
before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of
the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were
met with mockery and laughter."