It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture
of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is
not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of
others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to
those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The
African explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the
"heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose
husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most
melancholy way:
"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was
the only person present of all the members assembled
... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a
laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or
cared about the man, but each and all made anxious
inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of
barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau
school--for some such still remain--witness what I have
witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon
cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."
"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no
compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his
relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all
they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to
be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is
suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."
In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H.
Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New
World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt
by lying in a hammock when it caught fire:
"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of
gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting. Her friends,
however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died
soon after."
The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage,
was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of
the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.
Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of
the Canadian Indians (in the _Jesuit Relations_, VI., 245): "These
people are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick food
and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second
volume of the _Relations_ (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick
girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the
parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and
keep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again
(93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whose
recovery is deemed hopeless."
Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a
pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old
age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man
has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero
of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the
forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have
killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath
a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to
support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."