me. To the
Gauchos of Uruguay "inhumanity and love of bloodshed become second
nature." Their customs of treating beasts habituate them to bloodshed.
"They are callous to the sight of blood and suffering and come to
positively enjoy it." They have no affection for their horses and dogs.
They murder for plunder.[374] It is very rarely that we meet with such a
description as that of any people. Polynesians were bloodthirsty and
cruel, perhaps because they had no chase of wild animals in which to
expend their energies.[375] North American Indians could invent
frightful tortures, but they were not bloodthirsty. They were not
humane. Suffering did not revolt them. Schomburgk[376] tells a story of
an Indian who became enraged at his wife because she groaned with
toothache. He cut down her hammock and caused her to fall so that she
suffered a dislocation of the arm. A European witness went to the chief
with a report and remonstrance, but the chief was astonished that any
one should take any notice of such an incident. The Assyrians cut in
stone representations of flaying, impaling, etc., and of a king with his
own royal hands putting out the eyes of prisoners. The Egyptians
represented kings slaying men (national enemies) in masses. The Romans
enjoyed bloodshed and the sight of suffering.[377] The Middle Ages
reveled in cruelty to men and beasts. It is in the Middle Ages that we
could find the nearest parallels to the Gauchos above. None of these
people felt that repulsive revolt of the whole nature at inhumanity
which characterizes modern cultivated people. The horrors have all
receded out of our experience, and almost out of our knowledge. The line
of familiarity is set far off. Therefore a little thing in the way of
inhumanity is strange and exerts its full repulsive effect. Things
happen, however, which show us that human nature is not changed, and
that the brute in it may awake again at any time. It is all a question
of time, custom, and occasion, and the individual is coerced to adopt
the mores as to these matters which are then and there current.

+182. Selection by distinction.+ One of the leading modes by which the
group exercises selection of its adopted type on the individual is by
distinction. Distinction is selection. It appeals to vanity. It acts in
two ways and has two opposite effects. One likes to be separated from
the crowd by what is admired, and dislikes to be distinguished for what
is not admired. Cases occ