Which would be rather helped than hindered by a jealous attitude of joint prestige; so long as no divergent interests of members within the group were in a position to turn this state of the common sentiment to their own particular advantage.
This state of the case will have lasted for a relatively long time; long enough to have tested the fitness of these peoples for that manner of life,--longer, no doubt, than the interval that has elapsed since history began.

Special interests--e.g., personal and family interests--will have been present and active in these days of the beginning; but so long as the group at large was small enough to admit of a close neighborly contact throughout its extent and throughout the workday routine of life, at the same time that it was too small and feeble to allow any appreciable dissipation of its joint energies in such pursuit of selfish gains as would run counter to the paramount business of the common livelihood, so long the sense of a common livelihood and a joint fortune would continue to hold any particularist ambitions effectually in check.

Had it fallen out otherwise, the story of the group in question would have been ended, and another and more suitably endowed type of men would have taken the place vacated by its extinction.
With a sensible advance in the industrial arts the scale of operations would grow larger, and the group more numerous and extensive.

The margin between production and subsistence would also widen and admit additional scope for individual ambitions and personal gains.

And as this process of growth and increasing productive efficiency went on, the control exercised by neighborly surveillance, through the sentiment of the common good as against the self-seeking pursuits of individuals and sub-groups, would gradually slacken; until by progressive disuse it would fall into a degree of abeyance; to be called into exercise and incite to concerted action only in the face of unusual exigencies touching the common fortunes of the group at large, or on persuasion that the collective interest of the group at large was placed in jeopardy in the molestation of one and another of its members from without.