such a predatory attitude with a greater or less degree of
completeness, so that its scheme of life and canons of conduct
may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the predatory
animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to
come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory
aptitudes habits, and traditions this growth being due to a
change in the circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind
as to develop and conserve those traits of human nature and those
traditions and norms of conduct that make for a predatory rather
than a peaceable life.

The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a
peaceable stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from
psychology rather than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed
here. It will be recited in part in a later chapter, in
discussing the survival of archaic traits of human nature under
the modern culture.




Chapter Two

Pecuniary Emulation

In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure
class coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is
necessarily the case, for these two institutions result from the
same set of economic forces. In the inchoate phase of their
development they are but different aspects of the same general