THE CAUSES OF PERSECUTION 



possession of the hunting-grounds that insure 

 their means of subsistence. In this primitive 

 bestial state of society, there is nothing like a 

 normal state of peace. The nearest approach to 

 peace is a state of armed truce. Warfare between 

 tribes goes on chronically, the injury which one 

 inflicts upon another being compensated only 

 by some equivalent injury inflicted in revenge. 

 As all the foreign policy of a given tribe may be 

 thus summed up in perpetual murder of men, 

 so its internal industries may be mainly summed 

 up in the perpetual slaughter of animals that 

 serve for food. Every man is primarily a butcher. 

 To kill something is the prime necessity of life. 

 The direct infliction of death or of physical suf- 

 fering is the principal daily occupation of all the 

 members of the community ; and, as a correla- 

 tive effect of all this, the ability to meet death 

 or to endure physical suffering without flinch- 

 ing is one of the attributes of a hero that soci- 

 ety prizes most highly. The most complete in- 

 stance of a society of this sort that has acquired 

 historic fame is that of the Iroquois of New 

 York, in the seventeenth century. But there is 

 no doubt that, in all the respects we are now con- 

 sidering, our own Aryan ancestors who con- 

 quered and settled Europe were substantially 

 like the Iroquois. 



Now, in such a state of society as this, it is 

 obvious that men will inflict pain without the 

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