FACING PAGE BLIND BOYS AT DRILL IN "THE LIGHT HOUSE,' 225 THE FINDING OF ROMULUS AND REMUS (From an Old Print) 282 (Reproduced by Permission of Museum of Art, EVENING RECREATION CENTRE FOR BOYS, NEW MEETING OF AN "EVENING CENTRE," New FILLING CHRISTMAS BASKETS FOR POOR CHIL- SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL, FOUNDER OF THE 282 297 298 Illustrations xix A HEALTHY PAIR OF INDIAN CHILDREN, WEST ERN CANADA INFANT TOILERS IN A SILK MILL, SYRIA (Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.) FACING PAGE 318 CHILDREN OF TWO FAMILIES AS THE SOCIETY . 333 THE SAME FAMILIES-AFTER ATTENTION FROM THE SOCIETY 333 HENRY BERGH 336 THE "INSPIRATION" OF HENRY BERGH ON 336 THE JUVENILE Court, New YORK CITY; JUs- 337 History of the Child CHAPTER I 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. F 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 mental 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 youngan 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, 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 selfgratifying 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 impulsein 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. Alex. Bain, The Emotions and the Will. |