Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/142

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116
LEISURE AND MECHANISM

The stock instance of the friendly attitude is the feeling of a maternal mother for a young child. As the most obvious example of the unfriendly attitude we may take jealousy. Sex-love is, of course, a good example of instinctive co-operation, since no one can have descendants without another person's help. But in practice it is so hedged about by jealousy that, as a rule, it affords a less adequate example of friendly feeling than maternal affection. Paternal affection involves, as a rule, a mixed attitude. There is usually some genuine affection, but also much love of power, and much desire that children should reflect credit on their parents. A man will be pleased if his boy wins a prize at school, but displeased if he inherits money from his grandfather, so as to become independent of the paternal authority as soon as he is twenty-one. There is a melancholy satisfaction when one's boy dies for his country, of a sort not calculated to increase filial affection in those young men who witness it:

"Snug at the club two fathers sat,
Cross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat.
One of them said: 'My eldest lad
Writes cheery letters from Bagdad.
But Arthur's getting all the fun
At Arras with his nine-inch gun.'

'Yes,' wheezed the other, 'that's the luck!
My boy's quite broken-hearted, stuck
In England training all this year.
Still, if there's truth in what we hear,
The Huns intend to ask for more
Before they bolt across the Rhine.'
I watched them toddle through the door—
These impotent old friends of mine."

Of course war affords the supreme example of instinctive co-operation and hostility. In war, the instinctive prime mover is hostility; the friendly feeling towards our own side is derivative from hatred of the enemy. If we hear that some compatriot with whom we are unacquainted has been captured by the enemy and brutally ill-used, we shall be full of sympathy, whereas if his brother dies a lingering death from cancer we shall take it as a mere statistical