r than bearers of a culture that has never risen
above its present level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be
taken with the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence
to the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.

These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
another also in certain other features of their social structure
and manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic)
structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and
individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system.
At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of
existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual
ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the
most peaceable--perhaps all the characteristically peaceable--primitive
groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such
communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force
or fraud.

The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities
at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a
leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive
savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from
a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions
apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting
of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the
inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the
infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of
a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a
routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth
of an early discrimination between employments, according to which
some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient
distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
appreciable element of exploit enters.

This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
indus