Discuss the difference between host and the guest

 Discuss the difference between host and the guest.

Bearbohm in his essay, “Hosts and Guests” expresses his views about hosts and guests.
He says that mankind may be divided into two classes i.e., host and guest. According to him, in every human being, one of the two instincts dominates. Those who have the negative or passive instinct to accept it are the guests. There are many guests as there are hosts.
The writer says that our deepest instincts, bad or good are those which we share with the rest of the animate creation. The difference between host and guest is based on circumstances or temperament. When a man asks the other to dine with him in a restaurant and the other agrees, one pays-for the food and the other enjoys it, they are host and the guest according to their role.

 Bearbohm thinks that mankind can be divided generally into two categories: hosts and guests. The difference  between the two is not only circumstantial and particular but also temperamental and general. Every human being has either the positive and active instinct of being a host or the negative and passive instinct of being a guest. Hosts are those who have the natural instinct to serve others and guests are those who to be served.

The quality of hospitality is exclusively a human quality.It  has developed slowly with the development of the civilization. The cavemen did not entertain others because they were afraid of being killed by the hosts . The quality of hospitality developed slowly as human beings were organized into groups and the history of hospitality is full of painful incidents, the writer tells us that though the Israelites were considered to be the salt of the world, yet the treachery of the Jael was condemnable.

The Greeks cultured but Odysseus killed his guests under his own room and the Romans were at the peak of civilization in the 15th  century. Borgias concealed poison in their cellars for their guests. But the Scotch s’ hospitality is proverbial. It was Scotland that first formed hospitality with the basic principal that the guest must be honored .

The writer says that it is conventional for the rich to give and for the poor to take as a result of which the rich usually become hosts and the poor  become the guests. But this cannot be regarded as a rule because neither all the poor are guests nor all the rich are a the hosts. Most of the time i\It is simply the matter of one’s’ temperament. A host as a  guest is far worse than the guest as a host.
  like other boys he himself was a guest by nature but he often entertained his friends at the restau rant and was always afraid of the shortage of the money in his pocket. He feels that the guests must be obliged to their hosts but many times it is not so. Many guests  are often ungrateful to their hosts. In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might well say Kina is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.