Children, says the misopædist, are not only unfeeling where we look for sympathy and kindness, they are positively unkind, their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. “Cet âge,” wrote La Fontaine of childhood, “est sans pitié.” The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a common one. This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make attempts to smash its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, it is comforting to know, was not really hurt by this precocious explosion of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a "pretence"—and the little girl has since grown up to be a kind-hearted woman. Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child’s dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of a child’s cruelty. At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention in a child’s treatment of animals. The little girl M. when just a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. The little girl described by Miss Shinn would when two years old run up to a dog and jerk his ear till he snapped at her, and on one occasion resolutely thrust her hand into a bush to seize pussy, minding not the scratches.[169] Do we not see in this mauling of animals, even when it brings the child himself pain, evidences of a rooted determination to plague, and of a fierce delight in plaguing? ----- Footnote 169: _Notes on the Development of a Child_, pt. ii., p. 149 f. ----- The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that whatever the cruelty of adults may be children’s so-called cruelty towards animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. He feels he must have the pet, no matter at what cost to himself: of the cost to his victim he does not think. The stamping on the kittens was perhaps merely a childish way of holding them fast. Such actions are a manifestation of that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child’s attachment to the lower animals.