me odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction
in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand.
Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity
imputed to it.

With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion
has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than
assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is "formidable"; "worthy" is
"prepotent". A honorific act is in the last analysis little if
anything else than a recognised successful act of aggression; and where
aggression means conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes
to be especially and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong
hand. The naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of
force in terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in
vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a more advance
culture, commonly bear the stamp of this unsophisticated sense of
honour. Epithets and titles used in addressing chieftains, and in the
propitiation of kings and gods, very commonly impute a propensity for
overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person
who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in
heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to
enforce the same view.

Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
taking of life--the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
or human--is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of
slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a
glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even
in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the
dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.

It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
groups of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a
subsequent stage at w