Mr. Westermarck, than whom there is no better authority on a question of this sort, has filled several chapters of his work on the Origin and Development of Moral Ideas with evidence of the universality of kindness and the kindly ideal. After showing at length that uncivilized people recognize the duty of kindness and support from mother to child, father to child, child to parent, and among brethren and kinsmen, he goes on to say:[16] “But the duty of helping the needy and protecting those in danger goes beyond the limits of the family and the _gens_. Uncivilized peoples are, as a rule, described as kind toward members of their own community or tribe. Between themselves charity is enjoined as a duty and generosity is praised as a virtue. Indeed their customs regarding mutual aid are often much more stringent than our own. And this applies even to the lowest savages.” Beginning with the Australians, he quotes the statement of Spencer and Gillen that their treatment of one another “is marked on the whole by considerable kindness, that is, of course, in the case of members of friendly groups, with every now and then the perpetration of acts of cruelty.” Concerning the North American Indians he cites many writers. Catlin says “to their friends there are no people on earth that are more kind.” Adair that “they are very kind and liberal to every one of their own tribe, even to the last morsel of food they enjoy”; also that Nature’s school “teaches them the plain, easy rule, Do to others as you would be done by.” Morgan reports that “among the Iroquois kindness to the orphan, hospitality to all, and a common brotherhood were among the doctrines held up for acceptance by their religious instructors.” An Iroquois “would surrender his dinner to feed the hungry, vacate his bed to refresh the weary, and give up his apparel to clothe the naked.” And so Westermarck goes on, in the exhaustive way familiar to readers of his works, to show that like sentiments prevail the world over. Kropotkin has collected similar evidence in his Mutual Aid a Factor in Civilization. The popular notion of savages as lacking in the gentler feelings is an error springing from the external, usually hostile, nature of our contact with them. Indeed, a state of things, such as is found in our own cities, where want and plenty exist side by side without the latter feeling any compulsion to relieve the former, is shocking and incomprehensible to many savages.