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 which fighting is the
avowed and characteristic employment of the group. But it is not
implied that there has been an abrupt transition from unbroken
peace and good-will to a later or higher phase of life in which
the fact of combat occurs for the first time. Neither is it
implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the transition
to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe to
say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the
habits of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the
evidence from the well-known promptings of human nature enforces
the same view.

It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the