cessary to
success at a given moment, and is unjustifiable from the standpoint
of public safety, unless it be on the side of the suggestive effect
of intrepid conduct in creating a general standard of intrepidity.
Similarly, the Indians in general often failed to get the full benefit
of a victory, because of their practice that the scalp of an enemy
belonged to him who took it, and their pursuits after a rout were
checked by the delay of each to scalp his own.

The pedagogical attempts of primitive society, so far as they are
applied to boys, have as an end the encouragement of morality of a
motor, not a sentimental, type. The boys are taught war and the chase,
and to despise the occupations of women. Thompson says of the Zulu
boys:

It is a melancholy fact that when they have arrived at a very
early age, should their mothers attempt to chastise them, such
is the law that these lads are at the moment allowed to kill
their mothers.[186]

Ethnologists often make mention of the fact that the natural races do
not generally punish children; and while this is due in part to a less
definite sense of responsibility, as well as of less nervousness in
parents, non-interference is a part of their system of training:

Instead of teaching the boy civil manners, the father desires
him to beat and pelt the strangers who come to the tent; to
steal or secrete in joke some trifling article belonging
to them; and the more saucy and impudent they are, the more
troublesome to strangers and all the men of the encampment,
the more they are praised as giving indication of a future
enterprising and warlike disposition.[187]

Theft is also encouraged among boys as a developer of their wits. The
Spartan boy and the fox is a classical example; and Diodorus relates
that in Egypt the boy who wished to become a thief was required to
enrol his name with the captain of the thieves, and to turn over to
him all stolen articles. The citizens who were robbed went to the
captain of thieves and recovered their property upon payment of
one-fourth of its value.[188] Admiration of a lawless deed often
foreruns censure of the deed in consciousness today: there are few men
who do not admire a particularly daring and successful bank or diamond
robbery, though they deprecate the social injury done.

Formally becoming a man is made so much of in early society, because
it is on this occasion that fitness for activit