the commonplace body of the population and owe their emergence into the
leisure class to the exercise of traits and propensities which are not
to be classed as prowess in the ancient sense.

Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also
an expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel
is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less
deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of
opinion. In civilized communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon
only where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively
among that class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers
who are ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the
same time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
lower-class delinquents--who are by inheritance, or training, or both,
of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred
gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal
solvent of differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight
only when excessive momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to
inhibit the more complex habits of response to the stimuli that make
for provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is to say,
he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an archaic habit of
mind.

This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling disputes
and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory,
unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good
repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly,
that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In
the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all
countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on
the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows.
And spreading through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails
among the boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from
day to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is ordinarily no
secure basis of reputability for any one who, by exception, will not or
can not fight on invitation.

All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat v