and sagacity differs obviously from the women's
assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted
productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure.
Such being the barbarian man's work, in its best development and widest
divergence from women's work, any effort that does not involve an
assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition
gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a
canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally
possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such
as proceeds on the basis of prowess--force or fraud. When the predatory
habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it
becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy
to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as
attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience
those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but
must send his woman to perform that baser office.

As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are
unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour,
as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence
in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is
therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.

As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity--"teleological"
activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency
and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitu