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