The growth of altruism in the world has been largely cotemporaneous
with the growth of the power of _sympathy_. Sympathy is the emotion
a being has when by means of his imagination he gets so actually
into the place of another that his own feelings duplicate more or
less the feelings of that other. It is the ability or the impulse to
weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who are glad.
Sympathy is the substance and the only sure basis of morality—the
only tie of sincere and lasting mutualism. Men have always been to a
considerable extent, and are yet, disposed to think about and act
toward each other from motives of mutual fear or advantage. But such
motives are not the highest nor the most reliable bonds of
fellowship and unity. True altruism and solidarity—true expansion
and universalisation of the self—are found in sympathy. It is
impossible for one individual to do in his heart to another as he
would that another should do to him, unless he is at all times able
and willing to get into the place of that other, and to realise in
his own consciousness the results to the other of his acts. It is
only when there is such an intertwining of the consciousnesses that
the joys and sorrows of each individual consist to a greater or less
extent of the reflexes of the joys and sorrows around him that there
exists true social oneness. The great task of reforming the universe
is, therefore, since the world is so steeped in selfishness and
hate, the task of endowing beings, or the task of stocking the
universe with beings, with dispositions to get out of themselves. If
the far-away first parents of men and women had been broad-minded
beings instead of narrow—had been beings whose most natural
impulse was to be kind to others, and whose sympathies were as
far-reaching as feeling—terrestrial life would not to-day present
to the all-seeing understanding the disheartening spectacle it does
present, and the long struggle for justice and amelioration would
not have been.
The primary fact prompting and underlying the exploitation of one
being or set of beings by another is, and has always been.
_Selfishness_. Whenever and wherever one people have exploited
another—whether the exploiters have been savages, Jews, Romans,
Caucasians, or men—they have done so primarily because the act of
exploitation was a convenience and pleasure to them and in harmony
with their natures. This selfishness, in the case of civilised
peoples, has been acquired by them through inheritance from the
savage tribes from whom they have severally evolved; and the
selfishness of the savage is a legacy from the animal forms from
whom the savage has come. Human selfishness is simply an eddy of an
impulse that is universal—an impulse that has been implanted in
the nature of the life-process of the earth by the manner in which
life has been evolved.
But there is another fact which has generally, if not always,
contributed to every act of exploitation in this world, and that is
_Ignorance_—ignorance on the part of those who have executed the
exploitation: not ignorance of grammar or geography or any other
particular branch of human information or philosophy, but ignorance
regarding those upon whom they have worked their
will—unconsciousness on the part of the exploiters of the
similarity which actually existed between themselves and their
victims. However free an individual may be from naturally selfish
impulses, he will never act in an altruistic manner toward others
unless he is able to realise that these others, are similar to
himself, and that acts toward them produce results of good and evil,
of welfare and suffering, similar to what these same acts produce
when done to himself. Altruistic conduct implies not only altruistic
impulses, but altruistic conceptions as well. Tyrants hold, and have
always held, themselves to be an entirely different order of beings
from their subjects, and far more deserving. Read history—it is a
tale told over and over. Between those who have ruled and those who
have served—between the Ends and the Means—has ever yawned a
chasm, wide, deep, and impassable. The exploited have always been,
according to their masters, a fibrous set, unfavoured and unthought
of by the gods, endowed with little feeling or intelligence, and
brought into existence more or less expressly as adjuncts to their
masters. This is the theory of the savage, and it is the theory of
all those who have inherited his narrow and unfeeling philosophy.
The Gentile had no rights because he was a ‘pagan.’ He was a
human being, it is true, and had come forth from the womb of woman,
just as the Jew had. But he spoke a different language from the
Jews, had his own ways of life, belonged to a different order of
things, and was irritatingly unconcerned about the gods and
traditions of the ‘chosen people.’ The Gaul had no rights that
were inconvenient to Romans, because he was a ‘barbarian.’ The
fact that he had blood, and brains, and nerves, and love of life,
and ambitions, and that he suffered when he was subjected to
humiliation, hard treatment, and death, just as Romans did, was
never really thought of by the arrogant and reckless Romans. Romans
never realised in their minds what it meant for non-Romans to be
treated as they were treated; and one reason why they never realised
it was because it was convenient for them not to do so. To kill or
enslave a Gaul or German we now know, who are able to judge these
acts from an un-Roman and unprejudiced point of view, was
practically the same crime as to kill or enslave a Roman. But it was
not so to Romans. The most trifling offence against a Roman citizen
was enough, according to Roman law, to condemn the offender to
execution. But the most horrible outrages, when committed by Romans
upon non-Romans, were nothing. Romans always thought and felt _from
the standpoint of Romans_. They never got over into the world of the
‘barbarians,’ and really pictured to themselves—_really
felt_—the misfortunes of their victims. It was the same way with
the black man in the eyes of the white man a generation or two ago;
it is the same way with the brown man to-day. The black man had no
rights that were inconvenient for the white man to respect, because
he was a ‘nigger,’ and had no ‘soul,’ and was the offspring
of Ham. This spirit of unconsciousness, which has been so prominent
throughout the history of mankind, still survives in the minds of
civilised men and women to-day, as is shown by the conception (or
_mis_conception) cherished by the Caucasian toward the ‘nigger,’
by the Christian toward the ‘heathen,’ by the Moslem toward the
‘infidel,’ by the Protestant toward the Catholic, and _vice
versâ_, by the plutocrat toward the proletarian, by men toward
women, and by the human being toward the ‘animal.’
The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human
beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act
of exploitation. The great first cause of man’s inhumanity to
not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man’s
inhumanity to man—_Selfishness_—blind, brutal, unconscionable
egoism. Monopolist-like man thinks and cares only about himself. He
has the heart of the bully—deriving from the contemplation of his
fiendish supremacy a sort of monstrous satisfaction. But there is
also present in this case the same half-sincere, half-fostered
nescience as in all other cases of exploitation. The ox, the hare,
the bird, and the fish have no rights in the world in which they
live other than those that are convenient for men to allow to them,
because they are ‘animals.’ They are assumed to belong to an
order of beings entirely different from that to which human beings
belong. They are filled with nerves, and brains, and bloodvessels;
they love life, and bleed, and struggle, and cry out when their
veins are opened, just as human beings do; they have the same
general form and structure of body, their bodies are composed of the
same organs busied with the same functions; and they are descended
from the same ancestors and have been developed in the same world
through the operation of the same great laws as we ourselves have.
But all of these things, and dozens of others just as significant,
are disregarded by us in our hard-hearted determination to exploit
them. We have a set of words and phrases which we use in speaking of
ourselves, and another very different set for other beings. The very
same things are called by different names with wholly different
connotations depending on whether it is a man that is referred to or
some other being. It is ‘murder’ to take the life of a human
being, but to take the life of a sheep or a cow is only ‘knocking
it on the head.’ A man may murder squirrels or birds all
day—that is, he may do that which when done to human beings is
called murder—but it is only ‘sport’ when done to these humble
inhabitants of the wilds. The dead body of a man is a ‘corpse’;
the dead body of a quadruped is only a ‘carcass.’ A race of
horses or dogs is a ‘breed’; but a breed of men and women is
always respectfully referred to as a race. We perpetuate our
blindness by the use of words. We accommodate our consciences by
inventing ways of looking at things that will bring out our own
lustre and relieve us from the ghastly faces of our crimes. For the
human race to rob and kill other races is the same kind of activity
exactly as it is for human beings to rob and kill each other. But it
is not considered so to-day—except by a few lost-caste
‘visionaries’ scattered here and there over Christendom, and
some millions of ‘heathens’ in Asia.
A short time ago a series of letters came into my hands written from
Burmah by an American missionary in that country. According to this
writer, one of the greatest obstacles the missionaries have to
contend with in their work there is the hostility aroused in the
people by the killing and flesh-eating habits of the missionaries
themselves. The native inhabitants, who are the most compassionate
of mankind, look upon the Christian missionaries, who kill and eat
cows and shoot monkeys for pastime, as being little better than
cannibals. Contemplate the presumption necessary to cause an
individual to leave behind him fields white for mission-work, and
travel, at great expense, halfway round the earth in order to preach
a narrow, cruel, anthropocentric gospel to a people of so great
tenderness and humanity as to be kind even to ‘animals’ and
enemies!
We human beings feel at liberty to commit any kind of outrage upon
other races, and these outrages are looked upon by us as nothing.
But the most trifling annoyances of other races are deemed by us of
sufficient consequence to justify us in visiting upon them the most
fearful retributions. We can break up the laboriously built home of
a mother mouse in the rubbish-heap of our back yard, scatter the
pink babies of that mother over the ground to die of cold and
starvation, and cause the frightened mother to flee at the risk of
her very life—all to give to the terrier and ourselves a little
moment of savage pastime. But if that same mother, some hard
winter’s night, when she has failed in her search elsewhere for
something to stay her hunger, comes into our larder and nibbles a
bit of cheese or a few mouthfuls of crust from our pie, although she
takes but a crumb in all, and is as dainty in her feeding as a lady,
we immediately get out our traps and poisons and storm around as if
a murder or some other irreparable wrong had been committed. We
think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at
all, _entirely from the human point of view_. We never take the time
to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the
trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening
over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more
comfortable not to do so—_so much more comfortable to be blind and
deaf and insane_. We go on quieting our consciences, as best we can,
by the fact that everybody else nearly is engaged in the same
business as we are, and by the fact that so few ever say anything
about the matter—anaesthetised, as it were, by the universality of
our iniquities and the infrequency of disquieting reminders.
Many years ago an eccentric but gifted Englishman had a dream in
which he saw the fortunes of the world reversed. Man was no longer
master, but victim. The earth was ruled by the birds and quadrupeds,
the mice and monkeys, who proceeded to inflict upon their erstwhile
tyrant the same cruelties he had hitherto inflicted upon them.
‘Multitudes of human beings were systematically fattened for the
carnivora. They were frequently forwarded to great distances by
train, in trucks, without food or water. Large numbers of infants
were constantly boiled down to form broth for invalid animals. In
over-populous districts babies were given to malicious young cats
and dogs to be taken away and drowned. Boys were hunted by terriers
and stoned to death by frogs. Mice were a good deal occupied in
setting mantraps, baited with toasted cheese, in poor
neighbourhoods. Gouty old gentlemen were hitched to night-cabs, and
forced to totter, on their weak ankles and diseased joints, to
clubs, where fashionable young colts were picked up, and taken, at
such speed as whipcord could extract, to visit chestnut fillies.
Flying figures in scarlet coats, buckskins, and top-boots were run
down by packs of foxes that had nothing else to do. Old cock-grouse
strutted out for a morning’s sport, and came in to talk of how
many brace of country gentlemen they had bagged. Gamekeepers lived a
precarious life in holes and caves. They were perpetually harried by
game and vermin; held fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled
by stoats and martens; and finally, their eyes picked out by owls
and kites, they were gibbeted alive on trees, head downwards, until
the termination of their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case, a
naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully among the topmost
branches of a wood, while a mias underneath, armed with a gun,
inflicted on him dreadful wounds. A veterinary surgeon of Alfort was
stretched on his back, his arms and legs secured to posts, in order
that a horse might cut him up alive for the benefit of an equine
audience; but the generous steed, incapable of vindictive feelings,
with one disdainful stamp on the midriff, crushed the wretch’s
life out’.[1]
The following is from the Chinese. The speaker is an ox:
‘I request, good people, that you will listen to what I have to
say. _In the whole world there is no distress equal to that of the
ox_. In spring and summer, autumn and winter, I diligently put forth
my strength; during the four seasons there is no respite to my
labours. I drag the plough, a thousand-pound weight fastened to my
shoulders. Hundreds of thousands of lashes are, by a leather whip,
inflicted upon me. Curses and abuses, in a thousand forms are poured
upon me. I am driven, with threatenings, rapidly along, and not
allowed to stand still. Through the dry ground or the deep water I
with difficulty drag the plough, with an empty belly; the tears flow
from both my eyes. I hope in the morning that I shall be early
released, but I am detained until the evening. If, with a hungry
stomach, I eat the grass in the middle of the field, the whole
family, great and small, insultingly abuse me. I am left to eat any
species of herbs among the hills, but you, my master, yourself
receive the grain that is sown in the field. Of the _chen paddy_ you
make rice; of the _no paddy_ you make wine. You have cotton, wheat,
and herbs of a thousand different kinds. Your garden is full of
vegetables. When your men and women marry, amid all your felicity,
if there be a want of money, you let me out to others. When pressed
for the payment of duties, you devise no plans, but take and sell
the ox that ploughs your field. When you see that I am old and weak,
you sell me to the butcher to be killed. The butcher conducts me to
his home and soon strikes me in the forehead with the head of an
iron hatchet, after which I am left to die in the utmost distress.
My skin is peeled off, my bones are scraped, and my skin is taken to
cover the drum by which the country is alarmed.’
‘Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells
Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
To madness, while the savage at his heels
Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury.’
The angler brags about his ‘haul’ and the hunter about his
‘bag’ and his ‘big game’ with as little realisation of what
these things mean as the slave-master boasts of his ‘niggers.’
Men talk of ‘chops’ and ‘steaks’ and ‘roasts’ with the
same somnambulism, the same profound unconsciousness of what these
things really signify in the psychic economies of the world, as the
conqueror contemplates his ‘captives,’ the robber his
‘spoil,’ or the savage his ‘scalps.’ If before the eyes and
in the mind of each individual who sits unconcernedly down to a
parsleyed ‘steak’ could rise the facts in the biography of that
‘steak’—the happy heifer on the far western meadows, the
fateful day when she is forced by the drover’s whip from her
home,[2] the arduous ‘drive’ to the village and her baffled
efforts to escape, the crowding into cars and the long, painful
journey, the silent heartaches and the low, pitiful moans, the
terrible hunger and thirst and cold, her arrival, bruised and
bewildered, in the city, her dazed mingling with others, the great
murder-house, the prods and bellowings, the treacherous crash of the
brain-axe, the death drop and shudder, the butcher’s knife, the
gush of blood from her pretty throat, and the glassy gaze of her
dead but beautiful eyes—there would be, in spite of the inherent
hardness of the human heart, a great drawing back from those acts
which render such fearful things necessary. If human beings _could
only realise_ what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued
by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish
feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no
one of them, not even the most recreant, could find pleasure in such
work. _How painful_ to a person of tenderness and enlightenment is
_even the thought_ of rabbit-shootings, duck-slaughterings,
bear-hunts, quail-killing expeditions, tame pigeon massacres, and
the like! And yet with what light-hearted enthusiasm the mindless
ruffians who do these atrocious things enter upon them! One would
think that grown men would be ashamed to arm themselves and go out
with horses and hounds and engage in such babyish and unequal
contests as sportsmen usually rely on for their peculiar
‘glory.’ And they would be if grown men were not so often simply
able-bodied bullies. _If human beings could only realise what it
means to live in a world and associate day after day with other
beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves, and yet be
regarded by these more intelligent individuals simply as merchandise
to be bought and sold, or as targets to be shot at, they would hide
their guilty heads in shame and horror_.
The Being from whose breaking heart gushed these lines of sorrow and
sympathy on seeing a wounded hare was a god:
‘Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye:
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!
‘Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field
The bitter little that of life remains;
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.
‘Seek, mangled one, some place of wonted rest,
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed;
The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head.
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom pressed.
‘Oft, as by winding Nith I, musing, wait
The sober eve or hail the cheerful dawn,
I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn.
And curse the ruffian’s aim and mourn thy hapless fate.’
We human beings, in our conduct toward the races of beings
associated with us on this planet, are almost pure _savages_. We are
not even half civilised. And this fact is certain to bring upon us
the criticism and condemnation of the more enlightened generations
to come. The fact is apparent to-day, however—just as apparent as
the barbarity of the Romans—to everyone who will take the trouble
to rid himself of the prejudices which enslave and blind him, and
view human phenomena from an un-human, extra-terrestrial point of
view.
To most persons—to all except to a few—everything is simply a
matter of habit and education. And a majority of persons, too, can
become educated to one thing about as easily and completely as they
can to another. In Mr. Huxley’s ‘Man’s Place in Nature’
there is reprinted from an old volume the picture of a butcher’s
shop as it is said to have existed among the savage Anziques of
Africa in the sixteenth century. Mr. Huxley says that the original
engraving claims to represent an actual fact, and that he has
himself no doubt but it does really stand for just what it purports
to represent, especially since the fact has been corroborated by Du
Chaillu in comparatively recent times. The fact for which this old
picture stands is a good illustration of the power of custom in
shaping human ideas. In this savage ‘market’ pretty much the
same line of goods appears as is found in modern ‘markets,’
except that, instead of the quartered corpses of sheep and bullocks,
there hang the shoulders, thighs, and gory heads of men. The butcher
is represented as standing beside the chopping-block in the act of
cutting up the leg of a man. A child’s head and other fragments of
the human body are piled up on another block, and behind these on
pegs are ranged the more pretentious wares of the establishment.
‘Presently we passed a woman,’ says Du Chaillu, in speaking of
the cannibalism of the Fans, who were probably identical with those
referred to two centuries earlier as Anziques. ‘She bore with her
a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market
and carry thence a roast of steak.’ We can easily imagine (by the
help of the sights we see every day) the anthropophagous crowd
standing around giving their early morning orders, and the
enterprising assassin hustling about to wait on them. One of them
wants an arm, another wants a leg, another a liver, another a
half-dozen nice fat ribs. One fellow wants a tender ‘cut’ of
young girl’s sirloin, and another would like an old man’s calf
for soup. A little naked urchin, who has had to wait a long time in
order to get a chance to buy anything at all, exchanges a few shells
for a section of human bologna. One fellow wants to know the price
of the boy’s head which lies on the neighbouring block, and a
woman complains that the baby’s brains which she bought the day
before, and which were recommended as being especially ‘fresh and
nice,’ turned out to be ‘bad.’ We can see them go home with
their gruesome purchases, cook them, and sit down and eat them,
discussing their flavour or their lack of it, and remarking their
tenderness, toughness, or juiciness, and finally throwing the bones
out to the dogs—all with as little thought of the immorality of it
as ‘Thanksgiving’ gluttons have to-day at their feasts of blood.
There may have been an occasional ‘visionary’ among these people
fanatical enough to ‘refuse to eat meat,’ or even to protest
against the practice. Probably there was. There generally are a few
such discordants in every generation of vipers. But ‘fanatics’
in those days were in all likelihood, as they are to-day, too few to
be troublesome.
To anyone familiar with the pliability of the human conscience, or
with the soundness and depth of intellectual sleep, these things are
neither impossible nor strange. There is so little looking into the
essence of things, so little looking at things as they are, and so
much thinking and doing as we are accustomed or told to think and
do—there are, in fact, so few who can really think at all—that
if we had been accustomed and taught to do so from childhood, and
the world were practically unanimous in its conduct and teachings on
the matter, very few of us indeed would not sit down to a breakfast
of scrambled infant’s brains, a luncheon of cold boiled aunt, or a
dinner of roast uncle, with as little compunction, perhaps with the
same horrible merriment, as we to-day attend a ‘barbecue’ or a
‘turkey.’ Why should we not make hash and sausages out of our
broken-down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we do out of our
worn-out horses, and help out the pigeons at our killing carnivals
with a few live peasants? How much more artistic and civilised to
pile our tables on holy days with the gold and crimson of the fields
and orchards than to load them with the dead! And yet how strangely
few are mature enough to care anything at all about the matter.
Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the human mind! There
is no spontaneity, no originality, only the dead level of the
machine. How impossible it is for us to think, to discover anything
unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been pointed out to us
even, if it is a little different from what we are used to! This, it
seems to me, is one of the most pathetic things in all this
world—this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness to inspect
things from any other point of view than the one we inherit when we
come into the world; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing to
it), and never have the slightest suspicion of the fact. The human
mind will certainly not always be this way. It will surely be
different some time. It seems incredible that the planet will drag
along in disgrace this way forever. The men of Europe and America
are not so primitive as the junglemen, and the junglemen are
superior in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles, and this
gives reason for a little hope. _But when that is the question, when
will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our
prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world?_ Ages
upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the
detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of
the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills.
1. Hamley: _Our Poor Relations_; Boston, 1872.
2. I have many times seen cows chased all over their native
premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards, across
streams and over fences—chased until the poor things were utterly
exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their faces and backs were
covered with wounds—before they could be compelled to leave for
ever the old farm where they had been born and raised.