But there is another side to this. Intertribal wars, though they may in the very earliest stages of human culture be positively promotive of some of the social virtues, in later and more advanced stages exert a decidedly unfavorable influence upon the moral development. The low backward standard of intertribal ethics, reacting upon the higher and more advanced intratribal standard, tends to make it like unto itself. As Spencer expresses it, the life of internal amity is assimilated to the life of external enmity. “Taken in the mass the evidence shows,” he says, “as we might expect, that in proportion as intertribal and international antagonisms are great and constant, the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of enmity predominate; and conflicting as they do with the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of amity proper to the internal life of a society, they in greater or less degree suppress these, or fill with aggressions the conduct of man to man.”[63] Thus tribes engaged habitually in war are characterized by the frequency of homicide within the group. Tribes that regard the robbery of strangers as honorable come to regard stealing within the tribe as irreproachable.[64] Revengefulness, inhumanity, and untruthfulness within each tribe characterize warlike communities.[65] On the other hand, peaceful tribes are characterized by their superior intratribal morality. Tribes among whom war is infrequent or unknown are scrupulously honest.[66] Among such people crimes of violence are rare.[67] Thus war, a heritage (as a phase of the “struggle for existence”) of the human from the lower animal world, becomes early in the human stage of the cosmic evolution a drag upon the moral progress of the race.[68] CHAPTER III THE MORAL LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT: AN IDEAL OF SOCIAL JUSTICE I. CIRCUMSTANCES AND IDEAS WHICH MOLDED AND MOTIVED MORALITY [Sidenote: A homogeneous population and a comparatively static civilization] Egypt was the China of the ancient Mediterranean world. Like the Chinese, the Egyptians were a comparatively unmixed people. During the historic period no new elements of importance were incorporated with the native population. Again, like the civilization of China, that of Egypt throughout a great part of the historic age was singularly static. After having made wonderful advance in early times the Egyptians ceased to make further noteworthy progress. Both these fundamental facts of Egyptian history had great significance for Egyptian morals; for since when races mingle their blood they mingle also their moralities, it is a matter of supreme importance to the moral life of a people whether on the one hand it has, as the centuries have passed, undergone a change in physical type through the incorporation of new racial elements, or on the other hand has preserved unchanged its racial type and physical characteristics.