is created another safeguard against
want. But apart also from these methods of maintenance, at a very early
stage there is charitable relief. The festivals of the solstices and
equinoxes, and of the seasons, are the occasions for sacrifice and
relief; and, as Christmas customs prove, the instinct to give help or
alms at such festival periods still remains. Charity is concerned
primarily with certain elemental forces of social life: the relation
between these primitive instincts and impulses that still influence
charity should not, therefore, be overlooked. The basis of social life
is also the basis of charitable thought and action.

The savage is the civilized man in the rough. "The lowest races have,"
Lord Avebury writes, "no institution of marriage." Many have no word
for "dear" or "beloved." The child belongs to the tribe rather than to
the parent. In these circumstances a problem of charity such as the
following may arise:--"Am I to starve, while my sister has children
whom she can sell?" a question asked of Burton by a negro. From the
point of view of the tribe, an able-bodied man would be more valuable
than dependent children, and the relationship of the larger family of
brothers and sisters would be a truer claim to help than that of
mother and child. Subsequently the child is recognized as related, not
to the father, but to the mother, and there is "a kind of bond which
lasts for life between mother and child, although the father is a
stranger to it." Slowly only is the relative position of both parents,
with different but correlative responsibilities, recognized. The first
two steps of charity have then been made: the social value of the bond
between the mother, and then between the father, and the child has
been recognized. Until this point is reached the morality necessary to
the making of the family is wanting, and for a long time afterwards it
is hardly won. The virtue of chastity--the condition precedent to the
higher family life--is unrecognized. Indeed, the set of such religious
thought as there may be is against it. Abstract conceptions, even in
the nobler races, are lacking. The religion of life is vaguely
struggling with its animality, and that which it at last learns to
rule it at first worships. In these circumstances there is little
charity for the child and little for the stranger. "There is," Dr
Schweinfurth wrote in his _Heart of Africa_, "an