188 HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE. [cHAP. 



into existence, will be more likely to stay together, 

 to live under the same government, and consequently to 

 form a united and powerful tribe, able to overcome and 

 conquer those tribes which are kept in a divided state by 

 their deficiency in the domestic and civic virtues. 



This cause of superiority can exist only so long as there 

 is room for tribes to split up and separate. It will come 

 to an end when the increase of population is sufficiently 

 great to prevent them from spreading at will ; when agri- 

 culture succeeds to a pastoral life, and tribes consolidate 

 into nations. But when political communities are larger, 

 and wars are waged on a larger scale, the conditions of 

 The success are even more distinctly moral. The first of these 



vTitueT^ conditions are fidelity, and, what is intimately connected 

 with this, the capacity for obedience. This subject is 

 systematically misunderstood by Western Europeans, who 

 often appear to think that self-assertion and untameable- 

 ness of disposition are the best basis for the political 

 virtues. It may be true that the greater is the difficulty 

 of taming a race of men into civilization, the nobler is 

 their character when they have been so tamed. This, 

 I say, may be true, though I very much doubt it. But 

 uutameableness is simply the character of the savage, and 

 freedom and the love of freedom are of no moral worth 

 whatever unless they are based on loyalty and the capacity 

 for obedience. Fidelity, loyalty, and the capacity for 

 obedience are moral qualities of a very high order. It 

 is these more than any others which make political and 

 military combinations possible, and give political and 

 military power. 



Thus the domestic virtues which keep a tribe together 

 are those which conduce to power and to victory at the 

 first dawning of civil life in the nomadic and patriarchal 

 state ; and the political virtues are those which conduce to 

 power and to victory in a more advanced state of society. 

 We may perhaps say with some approximation to accuracy 

 that the former are characteristic of pastoral life, and the 

 latter of agricultural But there is a third kind of virtues 

 which are characteristic of civic life, and are called from 



