ive and selective action of the industrial process with which they
are immediately in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them, therefore, it
hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively predatory aptitudes and
propensities carried over by heredity and tradition from the barbarian
past of the race.

The educative action of the economic life of the community, therefore,
is not of a uniform kind throughout all its manifestations. That range
of economic activities which is concerned immediately with pecuniary
competition has a tendency to conserve certain predatory traits; while
those industrial occupations which have to do immediately with the
production of goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with
regard to the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to some
extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition (as, for
instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and salaries, in the
purchase of goods for consumption, etc.). Therefore the distinction
here made between classes of employments is by no means a hard and fast
distinction between classes of persons.

The employments of the leisure classes in modern industry are such as to
keep alive certain of the predatory habits and aptitudes. So far as
the members of those classes take part in the industrial process, their
training tends to conserve in them the barbarian temperament. But there
is something to be said on the other side. Individuals so placed as to
be exempt from strain may survive and transmit their characteristics
even if they differ widely from the average of the species both in
physique and in spiritual make-up. The chances for a survival and
transmission of atavistic traits are greatest in those classes that are
most sheltered from the stress of circumstances. The leisure class is in
some degree sheltered from the stress of the industrial situation,
and should, therefore, afford an exceptionally great proportion of
reversions to the peaceable or savage temperament. It should be possible
for such aberrant or atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity
on ante-predatory lines without suffering as prompt a repression or
elimination as in the lower walks of life.

Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. There is, for instance,
an appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose in