Closely related to the punishment of homicide in primitive society is punishment of lesser offenses, especially the infliction of bodily injury, within the social group. Here, too, private vengeance rules. The person wronged or injured inflicts such punishment upon the offender as passion or resentment may dictate. As time passes, however, and the sense of justice grows more discriminating, there are limits set to this private vengeance. There is established what is called the rule of equivalence. The avenger is not allowed to wreak upon the offender indiscriminate and unmeasured punishment, but is restricted to the infliction upon him of exactly such injury and pain as he has inflicted upon his victim. Hence arose the _Lex talionis_, limb for limb, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.[48] This regulation thus registers an advance in moral feeling, and may be regarded as probably the first rule of the criminal code of the nations. [Sidenote: The virtue of courage; its altruistic element] In early society those virtues are most highly esteemed which are of service to the clan or tribe. Thus courage comes to hold a first place among the virtues. What is especially important to be noted here is that under courage is hidden the virtue of self-sacrifice, which we give the highest place in our ideal of character. It is this altruistic element in courage which lends to it its real ethical quality. In primitive society this virtue finds expression chiefly in the ready self-devotion of the individual in battle for the common good. Throughout pagan antiquity this virtue held a central place in practically every ideal of excellence. In the words of Robertson Smith, “This devotion to the common weal was, as every one knows, the mainspring of ancient morality and the source of all the heroic virtues of which ancient history presents so many illustrious examples.”[49] III. THE BEGINNINGS OF INTERTRIBAL MORALITY [Sidenote: Primitive man’s double standard of morality] The accounts given by travelers and observers of the morals of savages often present a perplexing contrariety of opinion. Some writers represent such people as absolutely without a moral sense, while others, as has already been remarked, hold them up as models for imitation by ourselves. This contrariety in view results in part from an overlooking of the fact, just pointed out, that the moral goodness of the savage is largely a negative goodness, but chiefly from a failure to observe that the shield has two sides, that is to say, that savages have a double standard of morality--one standard regulating conduct within the social group, and another regulating conduct toward outsiders. Thus the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” means to the savage merely that he shall not kill a kinsman. It has in his mind no application to strangers, just as in our minds it has no application to animals.