maternal affection the beginning of human altruism—sympathy and parental love the basis of other virtues—the weakest sacrificed in all primitive society—neglected chapters in the history of the attitude of society toward children.
if it were possible to postulate the first definite concept of the first family that crossed the vague and age-consuming frontier between animality and humanity, it would be safe to say that this primitive and almost animal mind would reach for an approximation, on the part of the male, to the maternal affection.
in the gathering of food and the making of protective war, many animals are the rivals in instinct and intelligence of primitive man. continued development in that regard might have produced a race of men “formidable among animals through sheer force of sharp-wittedness,” but not homo sapiens. in the passage from animality to humanity, there was not only mental2 evolution, but moral, and the developing mind would naturally exercise itself for days and years, and perhaps for long periods around that one emotion—the love of the female for its young—an emotion he was incapable of understanding, but the outward manifestations of which he would be bound to imitate.
whether man was led to an understanding of the maternal affections by the “sensuous aspects of the newly-born progeny” appealing to man himself,1 or through pity and sympathy, as spencer suggests, or still more through imitation of the maternal delight, he undoubtedly would be led to a higher mental plane as he slowly came to understand that the maternal affection was not self-gratifying in the sense that marked the entire gamut of his own emotions up to that time.
even in recent times tribes have been found so low in the social scale that coition and child-birth have been assumed to have no relation, the latter phenomenon being explained by ascribing to certain trees the power to make women fructile. in a society as low in mentality as this, it would be easy to conceive that the woman’s unselfishness—her lack of the self-gratifying impulse—in protecting, nursing, and rearing a burden superimposed on her with no pleasurable antecedents, would be even more amazing than it would be to the male living in a state sufficiently advanced to understand the reproductive function.
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in either state of society, there then begins in the human consciousness a disturbance “which is significant of something having another value than that of mere pleasure, and which is pregnant with the promise of another than the merely sensuous or merely intellectual life.”2 the words quoted are prof. ladd’s, discussing the philosophy of conduct of civilized man—but here, even in the primitive man, the rule applies—the moral idea is born, legitimately enough, out of the altruistic maternal affection.
not infrequently one comes across such expressions as “when man became civilized,” starting always the baffling inquiry—what civilized man? the mystery of life, as bergson suggests, may be its solution, for in the acquired tendency of looking on the world as containing one emotion at least that was not purely self-gratifying, man was preparing himself for the virtues that followed in the wake of his own first altruistic concept. the loyalty without which there could be no sociality has, on the one hand, a reasoned basis—the selfish and protecting one that may also explain the gregariousness of animals—but it differs from gregariousness by subordinating to the good of another one’s own pleasure, just as the mother subordinates her wishes to the pleasure and good of the infant. it is, in fact, the developed emotion that the male acquires through imitation and sympathy from the female, for, “when a tendency splits up4 in the course of its development, each of the special tendencies which thus arise, tries to preserve and develop everything in the primitive tendency that is not incompatible with the work for which it is specialized.”3
back of this sociological “leap” is nature’s long preparation. “the stability of animal marriage,” says wundt,4 “seems in general to be proportional to affection for the young,” and yet the primitive instincts are sometimes so powerful that even among those animals in whom the maternal instinct is strongly developed, they will, even after facing great danger for their young, desert them when the time comes to migrate. this darwin says is true of swallows, house martins, and swifts.5
but even in the lowest animals the “chief source of altrusim” is the family group as it revolves round the care of the young,6 while with the increase in the representative capacity that differentiates man from the brute, and the prolongation of the period of human infancy, there is born real altruism, the germ of morality, through the “knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male parent.”
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how then does it happen that an instinct that has been productive of so much for humanity, an instinct that has given birth to most of those virtues that mark civilized from savage man,7 served apparently so little as a safeguard for the offspring that generated the moral evolution? studying the cross currents and the ever-present struggle for existence of the various nations that worked out of barbarism to civilization, we see that after all it is by and through the very virtues, tenderness, sympathy, and humanity, that were first aroused by the helpless offspring, that the infant comes in turn to be protected, though the path is frequently a tortuous one.
the society that was able to exist in primitive times was always the one that sacrificed the individual,8 and the infant was naturally low in the scale of value. that very sacrifice of the weakest, stratified into a national characteristic, produced in the greatest civilization of ancient times, a narrow and egoistical morality, with little conception of what we call humanity. “no greek ever6 attained the sublimity of such a point of view,” says george henry lewes.9
in this, the “century of the child,” there is a great conception of humanity, and even of children’s rights. little attempt, however, has been made to trace in consecutive and co-ordinate fashion the development among races and nations of the progress of the human race in its attitude toward children. we who are so much interested in the betterment of the race and who are so much moved by humanitarian considerations that almost the first consideration of the state is to provide for the children, have reached this point of view only after a long struggle against blind ignorance and reckless selfishness.
the fact that less than fifty years have passed since we began a definite policy concerning the rights of children shows how rapidly the human race moves. the race may be, let us say, something like 240,000 years old; of that time civilized man—accepting the most generous figures on egyptian and mesopotamian civilization—has existed only 10,000 years, or 1/240 of the life of the human species.
humanized man has existed not more than a few hundred years, and it is within only fifty years that the race has been concerned with the protection of the child. how deeply ingrained are the habits of barbarity and darkness, may be seen from the fact that cannibalism broke7 out in japan not more than a hundred years ago.
unquestionably, this is the century of the child. undoubtedly, more serious thought is being given in the present generation to the subject than has ever been given before in the entire history of the world. more has been written about the child in the last fifty years than had been written in the world in all civilized times up to the beginning of this half-century. in order to appreciate this statement one must remember that the best friends of the child—jesus, the jewish prophets, and mohammed—lived centuries before the human theories that they preached had really a living existence.
in this connection, it is germane to state that the theory that philosophy and religion go hand in hand with humanity, is shattered by the fact that plato, aristotle, confucius, and gautama affected, apparently, not a single jot, the ancient attitude of insufferance toward the undesired children.
there has ever been, on the question of his children, a struggle between man and nature. endowed with the possibilities of a large offspring man has fought the burdens that nature has thrust upon him. on first view, it seems that parental affection never develops to great degree unless the economic conditions are favourable; yet the various artifices and “laws” used by tribes to get rid of children would show that parental affection kept struggling with the inclinations of men. in8 other words, if we find, as we do, female children sacrificed in one place because they are useless, and all first-born children sacrificed in another place because the gods must be propitiated, it is evident that parental affection (as represented by the women) was strong enough to force the male sovereigns to invent plausible excuses and taboos in order to have the women give up their offspring.
considering all that is being done, said, and written on the subject of the child and the relation of the state and citizen toward the child, it would seem safe to assume that there would be some interest in the attitude of our predecessors toward children.
from the regulation of romulus, as set forth by dionysius halicarnassus, to the story of mary ellen, as set forth by a settlement worker on the east side of new york city, is a far cry, but the progress from the first to the second is steady. the roman general, agathocles, who made as a part of the terms of peace with the carthaginians an agreement on the part of that branch of the semitic race that they would cease to sacrifice children, was a legitimate sociological progenitor of the representative of the arm of the law that stops a drunken father from beating his child and creates a children’s court where the child gets gentleness with justice, not contamination and corruption.
mary ellen and the scissors with which she was beaten
“every historian ought to be a jurist; every jurist ought to be a historian,” says ortolan, and 9the historian of child progress feels not only the truth of that statement but the added necessity of meeting the various economic theories that have dealt with the care of the child, from those of lycurgus to the latter-day essay of malthus.
the law of primogeniture and the varying laws of inheritance have occasionally led to the study of children as children, but generally the main interest in them of historian and jurist has been as a channel for the transmission of property.
theories about population and the fascinating pursuit of unravelling tangled economic laws, have obscured the fact that the attitude of a state toward children has been, with few variations, an index to its social progress. the same thing has been said of women, but while the greeks treated women well, yet with the exception of the single dema10 of thebes, infanticide was common in all the greek states.
the chinese are kind to their women and yet there is no country today where infanticide is more common. the oldest civilization in the world, the babylonian, was not one in which women were10 ill-treated, yet all the indications are that infanticide was practised in the shape of human sacrifice.
the rajputs of india pleaded for their privilege of destroying infant children when theirs had been the highest civilization in the world.
in other words, disinterested affection for the infant is not necessarily coincident with civilization, or the kind treatment of women a sure sign that the lives of children are safe.
various writers, including walt whitman, nietzsche, and edward carpenter, have taken the attitude that our much vaunted civilization does not really represent progress, and one vivacious author11 has even undertaken to show in a clever and lively way that there is no such thing as progress, pointing to greek civilization, in which children were killed at will and public men were confessed degenerates, as the ideal from which we of modern times have fallen away.
what is undoubtedly true is that civilization does not always indicate social progress, and what is truer is that civilization does not necessarily indicate the humanization of the people.
chremes, the very character in terence12 who says “nothing human is alien to me,” is the one who reproves his wife for not having gotten rid of their child. the advance over homer as11 shown by virgil is that of a great gentleness, a great humaneness,—a difference in their times,—and yet cicero, who represents the stoical and gentler sentiments of the virgilian times toward the helpless and powerless victims of force as did no man up to his day, speaks tolerantly of the inhuman practices of his time. but there is a growth of humaneness from homer to virgil, there is advance from plato to cicero, humanely speaking of course; there was greater advance in the teachings of christ, and there was further advance in the course of the long-drawn-out struggle between the nominal acceptance of those teachings and their incorporation into the daily philosophy. so, too, progress in the care of the rights of infancy and childhood has been made very little by very little.
it is the fact that, until 1874, there was no organized movement to defend the “rights” of children that led the author to investigate the conditions that had existed previous to that time. the first child’s protective movement began in new york in the year mentioned, and the rapidity with which this spread throughout the world indicated that some general law, or as brinton says, psychological process was at work. today there are protecting societies in every country where there are caucasian peoples. to go to the sources of the child protection movement, it was necessary to understand the industrial conditions which arose in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth cen12tury, and the latter part of the seventeenth, when the boast was made that children were at last being made useful.
back of the misuse of children in factories is the interesting story of the rise of modern industrialism with the early attempts of the guilds to protect children, not so much out of any development of the human feelings as from the guild’s desire to protect the male labourer from unfair competition.
the decree of napoleon in 1811,13 declaring that the unprotected infant was a charge on the state, marked another advance in humanitarianism; back of this advance was the long and interesting story of the endeavours of the religious orders and the charitably disposed persons of the middle ages to save the lives of children, the most conspicuous benefactor of childhood being the noble st. vincent de paul. it was he who gave to the golden glories of france’s golden age a touch of humanity that would otherwise have been lacking in the epoch ruled over by mazarin and later the great louis.
leading up to the efforts of st. vincent de paul was that complex and interesting chapter of the mixing of the old german laws with the roman laws, as the barbarians found them.
that the semi-barbarous tribes that descended on rome were better qualified to take up the humane side of the christian work than was the decadent roman, we can assume from the statement13 of tacitus, that among the germans children were treated more kindly than they were by the then ruling lords of the earth.
satire there may have been, as guizot and voltaire suggest, in much that tacitus wrote about the superior morality of the germans, but later history demonstrated their ethical superiority over the nation that was then on the verge of moral decay.
in any case, as the christian religion spread among the tribes that had enfiladed rome, there are evidences of more humane consideration for children until we find bishop datheus as early as 787 a. d. founding an asylum for children in a spirit strangely in advance of his time, though the bitter protests of the christian fathers in the second century against the slaughter and misuse of children put the mark of infamy on the persecutors of children for all time.
the roman laws, as the barbarians found them, were the result of a slow growth of a thousand years from the time when the founder attempted to check the slaughter of young children by what must have been, in those primitive times, more or less drastic legislation. that the teachings of christ and the teachings of the stoics led to the same result does not detract from the credit due to christianity for first putting on its proper basis, as we see things now, the standing of the child in the matter of its rights.
back of the roman developments is the greek14 attitude toward children, disappointing, if we look for the perfection that we find in art and in philosophy, doubly disappointing when we find that both plato and aristotle saw the child only as a possibility—only as something of which we must await developments—only as a human ovum.
when we come to trace the attitude of other races, of other civilizations, toward children, we find much the same story: out of barbarism, civilization; out of civilization, humanity, though it has been usually the great semitic religions—judaism, christianity, and mohammedanism—that have awakened the humane instinct the world over. the humane teachings of the stoics were not unlike those of the great religious teachers, but, lacking the intense driving power of religious fervour, it is doubtful if they could have accomplished the revolutions that these three religions did.
that all the great nations, the historical divisions of the races, or those that passed out of barbarism into civilization, carried with them some trace of early cannibalistic days or child-murder days, seems a safe conclusion; and while occasional followers and interpreters of the malthusian philosophy have at times attempted to defend indirectly these practices as part of the checks and balances by which over-population is defeated, the fact remains that the development of the parental instinct, the greatest of civilizing forces, has slowly, but surely, tended to put an end to these “checking” and “balancing” practices.
