ait that is present in some degree in every member of the
species, and which therefore rests on a broad basis of race continuity.

Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a process
of selection so severe and protracted as that to which the traits here
under discussion were subjected during the predatory and quasi-peaceable
stages. These peaceable traits are in great part alien to the methods
and the animus of barbarian life. The salient characteristic of the
barbarian culture is an unremitting emulation and antagonism between
classes and between individuals. This emulative discipline favors those
individuals and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage
traits in a relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate
these traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable
degree, in the populations that have been subject to it. Even where the
extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian type of temperament
is not paid, there results at least a more or less consistent repression
of the non-conforming individuals and lines of descent. Where life is
largely a struggle between individuals within the group, the possession
of the ancient peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an
individual in the struggle for life.

Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the presumptive
initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of good-nature, equity, and
indiscriminate sympathy do not appreciably further the life of the
individual. Their possession may serve to protect the individual from
hard usage at the hands of a majority that insists on a modicum of
these ingredients in their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their
indirect and negative effect in this way, the individual fares better
under the regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these
gifts. Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life,
may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the
individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly successful men of all
times have commonly been of this type; except those whose success has
not been scored in terms of either wealth or power. It is only within
narrow limits, and then only in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the
best policy.

As seen from the point of view of life under modern civilized conditions
in an enlightened community of the Western culture, the primitive,
ante-predatory savage, whose cha