6 5 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



we look for sympathy and kindness; they are positively unkind, 

 their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the 

 brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is 

 here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. " Cet age," wrote 

 La Fontaine of childhood, " est sans pitieV' The idea that chil- 

 dren, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a com- 

 mon one. 



This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to 

 other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to 

 find one's self supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, 

 I have reason to think, are in such circumstances capable of 

 coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of 

 one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a 

 baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make futile 

 attempts to smash its head, much as she would, no doubt, have 

 tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The 

 baby, I may as well add, was not really hurt by this shocking 

 precocity of infanticidal impulse perhaps the smashing was 

 more than half a " pretense " and the little girl grew up to be a 

 kind-hearted woman. 



Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably 

 rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in 

 the child's dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we 

 mostly think when we speak of a child's cruelty. Young chil- 

 dren are not, I think, often charged, even by the harshest of their 

 accusers, deliberately with inflicting pain on their human com- 

 panions. 



At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious 

 intention in a child's treatment of animals. Look, for example, 

 at a little girl trying to get the cat from some hiding place. She 

 grabs at its tail, receives formidable scratches, yet perseveres 

 with something of a soldier's indifference to her own pains. Do 

 we not here see evidences of a determination to plague, and of a 

 delight in plaguing ? Or watch a child chasing a fly on the win- 

 dow pane, and note the hard, doglike pertinacity with which he 

 follows it up and at length pins and crushes it with his fingers. 



The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too 

 difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that, what- 

 ever the cruelty of adults may be, children's so-called cruelty 

 toward animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight 

 of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long- 

 suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict 

 pain, but to the child's impulse to hold, possess, and completely 

 dominate the pet animal. It is a manifestation of that odd mix- 

 ture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child's 

 attachment to the lower animals. 



