It would be foolish to retort that the savage’s delight in the torture of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives.  The African explorer Andersson (O.R., 156) describes the “heart-rendering sorrow—­at least outwardly,” of a Damara woman whose husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most melancholy way: 

“I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was the only person present of all the members assembled ... who at all felt for her lonely condition.  Many a laugh was heard, but no one looked sad.  No one asked or cared about the man, but each and all made anxious inquiries after the rhinoceros—­such is the life of barbarians.  Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau school—­for some such still remain—­witness what I have witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon cease to envy and praise the life of the savages.”

“A sick person,” writes Galton (190), “meets with no compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is suffocated.  Very few Damaras die a natural death.”

In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana (151, 225) the Rev. W.H.  Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New World.  The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt by lying in a hammock when it caught fire: 

“She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her look of gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting.  Her friends, however, took no trouble about her, and she probably died soon after.”

The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage, was seized with cholera.  The Indians simply cast him on the edge of the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.

Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of the Canadian Indians (in the Jesuit Relations, VI., 245):  “These people are very little moved by compassion.  They give the sick food and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them.”  In the second volume of the Relations (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone.  He asked the permission of the parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and keep her, “for to them she was no better than a dead dog.”  And again (93) we read that in case of illness “they soon abandon those whose recovery is deemed hopeless.”

Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general.  After a man has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have killed.  He totters along behind them “almost crushed to earth beneath a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers.”