DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS

Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another—­feeling the other’s joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an eagerness to diminish the other’s pains and increase the pleasures.  Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling?  On the contrary, he gloats over another’s anguish, while the other’s joys arouse his envy.  Pity for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of humanity.  Monteiro says (A. and C., 134) that the negro

“has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compassion for suffering.  A fellow-creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment.  I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put it out of its misery.”

Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he witnessed among the Apaches.  A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on the ground.  Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible cries.  Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill the beast.  And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason than because meat cut from a live animal “was considered more tender,” Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as “a savage in every sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.”  In the Jesuit Relations (Vol.  XIII., 61) it takes ten pages to describe the tortures inflicted by the Hurons on a captive.  Theodore Roosevelt writes in his Winning of the West (I., 95): 

“The nature of the wild Indians has not changed.  Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look another in the face and speak of.  Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out—­these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims.”

In his famous book, The Jesuits in North America, the historian Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same fiendish tortures as the men.  On one occasion he relates of the Iroquois (285) that

“they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side.  Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings.”

On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.  Among their prisoners