impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
points of view.

The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
as habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the
foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind as to develop and
conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.

The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
human nature under the modern culture.

Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation

In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.
In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different
aspects of the same general facts of social structure.

It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure
and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither
does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.
The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning
of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful
articles to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin
and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the
beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable
claim on the other hand.

The early differentiation out of