286 SOCIAL PROGRESS 



blood, and, perhaps for this reason, can excite 

 emotions of more general sympathy. The Mediter- 

 ranean races are still very far from humane : their 

 descendants in Central and South America are 

 not infrequently obsessed by a maniacal lust 

 for cruelty. The Baltic races may claim with 

 some reason that they are less passionately 

 afflicted with a desire to torture, mutilate or 

 kill ; but their history abounds with illustrations 

 of the fierce over-mastery of cruel impulses. 

 Now, however, amongst them and especially in 

 England philanthropy has become a fashion of 

 the day. It is not merely that enormous sums are 

 dispensed in charity, or that the well-to-do 

 consent without much grumbling to be taxed in 

 order to educate and feed the children of the 

 poor, but that there is a desire to see and mix with 

 the poor, to visit them in their homes, and render 

 them personal service. Cynics may object that 

 these benevolent feelings are prompted by the 

 consciousness that the poor have votes. Not so : 

 they are also awakened by the ill-treatment of 

 animals ; and, indeed, there are many to whom 

 the overloading of a horse is more distressing than 

 the sight of a neglected and hungry child. In 

 Canada and the United States alms-giving is 

 hardly practised : if any need it, they would 

 resent the offer of it. But a spirit of mutual 

 helpfulness is manifest everywhere : it is good 

 to watch frock- coated doctors and lawyers, at a 

 suburban railway station on their way to town, 

 turn their hands to assist market-gardeners in 

 loading their boxes of fruit on to the train. In 

 both Europe and America this impulse of kindly 

 consideration for others is taking the place of 

 formal rules of morality. It can find excuses for 

 crime, which are mitigating the severity of the 

 penal laws. It may soften the struggle between 



