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 200 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

which involve the exercise of this virtue. Other employments, in which men are occupied with tamely shaping inert materials to human use, become unworthy and end with becoming deba- sing. The honorable man must not only show capacity for predatory exploit, but he must also avoid entanglement with the occupations that do not involve exploit. The tame employments, those that involve no obvious destruction of life and no spec- tacular coercion of refractory antagonists, fall into disrepute and are relegated to those members of the community who are defect- ive in predatory capacity ; that is to say, those who are lacking in massiveness, agility, or ferocity. Occupation in these employ- ments argues that the person so occupied falls short of that decent modicum of prowess which would entitle him to be graded as a man in good standing. In order to an unsullied reputation, the appearance of evil must be avoided. Therefore the able- bodied barbarian of the predatory culture, who is at all mindful of his good name, severely leaves all uneventful drudgery to the women and minors of the group. He puts in his time in the manly arts of war and devotes his talents to devising ways and means of disturbing the peace. That way lies honor.

In the barbarian scheme of life the peaceable, industrial employments are women's work. They imply defective force, incapacity for aggression or devastation, and are therefore not of good report. But whatever is accepted as a conventional mark of a shortcoming or a vice comes presently to be accounted intrin- sically base. In this way industrial occupations fall under a polite odium and are apprehended to be substantially ignoble. They are unsportsmanlike. Labor carries a taint, and all con- tamination from vulgar employments must be shunned by self- respecting men.

Where the predatory culture has developed in full consistency, the common-sense apprehension that labor is ignoble has devel- oped into the further refinement that labor is wrong — for those who are not already beneath reproach. Hence certain well- known features of caste and tabu. In the further cultural devel- opment, when some wealth has been accumulated and the mem- bers of the community fall into a servile class on the one hand