The salient characteristic of the barbarian culture is an unremitting emulation and antagonism between classes and between individuals.

This emulative discipline favors those individuals and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage traits in a relatively slight degree.

It therefore tends to eliminate these traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable degree, in the populations that have been subject to it.

Even where the extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian type of temperament is not paid, there results at least a more or less consistent repression of the non-conforming individuals and lines of descent.

Where life is largely a struggle between individuals within the group, the possession of the ancient peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an individual in the struggle for life.
Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the presumptive initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of good-nature, equity, and indiscriminate sympathy do not appreciably further the life of the individual.