Most people recognize the Scout Law, at least when they hear it recited: A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I’ve been reciting this code for going on 58 years now. Every Scout is required to tell what it means in one’s own words. Two of those attributes – “points” of the Scout Law – are a complementary doublet that are difficult for some folks to distinguish from each other. They are “courteous” and “kind.” Courtesy and kindness both reference complicated social codes of behavior, but they are not the same thing. They lie alongside each other going back many hundreds of years. Kind is the older term. It comes from Old English cynde. It means the quality that distinguishes one thing from another. As in, “What kind of thing was it?” In talking of creatures, it means “species,” as in the KJV: “And God created them after their kinds.” In the later Middle Ages, kind becomes synonymous with “nature,” not only the nature of each thing in itself but Nature capitalized – like Latin Natura -- eventually “Mother Nature.” The Greek equivalent was physis, hence “physical,” “physics,” and “physician.” So to act according to one’s nature was to be “kindly.” This didn’t mean gentle or harmless, unless that was considered natural to the person or beast in question. To lose one’s wits was to “fall from one’s kind,” like Nebuchadnezzar, who lived among the beasts and knew himself not as a man. But a person who was acting in a way thought unnatural was being “unkind.” Certain relationships were thought of as carrying inborn, or natural, modes of behavior. A parent should care for his or her children. A child should obey its parent. Family of all sorts and degrees had obligations to each other. Likewise neighbors should help one another in a hard and dangerous world, even if those neighbors didn’t particularly like each other. When Brutus stabbed Caesar, he was not merely being ungrateful for the advantages Caesar had bestowed upon him; as one rumored to be his son, Brutus’s act was a kind of parricide. This is why Shakespeare says, “This was the most unkindest cut of all.” In addition to these human relationships with their inborn duties, human beings had a responsibility toward their fellow creatures. Domestic animals were not to be abused. Even game animals were to be killed cleanly in the hunt. Cruelty to animals was considered “unkind” – unnatural – hence our admonition, “Be kind to animals.” Courtesy, meanwhile, is from French and came in with the Normans. It refers to the artificial code of conduct – what we call “good manners” – practiced in a lord’s court. There were all sorts of rules about how to address other people of various ranks, how to handle food at table, what to wear, what bodily functions to suppress, etc. In addition, there were “polite” (i.e., public, from Greek polis, “city”) modes of behavior that had to do with managing status and exercising civic responsibilities. Courtesy was not considered a natural way to act. It had to be learned. In some ways, it was deliberately created in order to exclude those who had not learned it. And acting in a courteous manner didn’t mean you weren’t also a nasty piece of work, but you knew the code, and followed it. As someone once said, “a gentleman is someone who never gives offense unintentionally.” Sometimes a gentleman or lady fully intended it. Anyway, a Scout is courteous because he knows the social codes of his society and practices good manners as they are currently defined. But a Scout also acknowledges the duties laid on him by parents and family, neighbors, and fellow creatures, and acts in a way that gives to all what they innately deserve, and this is what we mean by being kind.