The stage of intellectual development of a given society determines in general whether the moral standard shall be high or low. Peoples still on the level of savagery must necessarily have a very simple moral code, embracing only a few rudimentary virtues. As a people or race progresses in intelligence and the mental horizon widens, the moral sense becomes clarified and the moral standard comes to embrace new and refined virtues, corresponding to the larger and truer mental life; for, speaking broadly, there is a general coincidence between intellectual and moral growth. To create a new intellectual life is to create a new moral life.[16] Physical environment is also a potent agency in determining the cast of the moral type. Thus the hot depressing climate and the prodigality of nature in the tropics foster the passive, quietistic virtues; while the harsher and more grudging nature of the temperate regions favors the development of the active, industrial virtues. The strongly contrasted moral types of the peoples of the tropic regions of the earth and those of the temperate lands may without reasonable doubt be ascribed, in part at least, to differences in the climatic and other physical influences to which these peoples have been subjected through long periods of time. More positively influential in the formation of moral ideas and feelings are social institutions. Thus the place which a whole group of moral qualities that we designate as domestic virtues are assigned in the ethical standard is determined by the place which circumstances may have given the family in the social organism. In ancient Sparta, for example, where certain influences subordinated the family in an unusual degree to the state, the family virtues held a very low place, indeed scarcely any place at all, in the moral ideal; while in China, where certain notions of the relation of the spirits of the dead members of the family to its living members created a remarkable solidarity of the family group, the domestic virtues, and among them preëminently the virtue of filial piety, came to determine the entire cast of the general ideal of goodness. Government is another potent agency in molding the moral type. Patriarchal monarchy and popular government tend each to nourish a distinct morality, so that we speak of the ethics of monarchy and the ethics of democracy. As time passes, governments, speaking broadly, become constantly more and more ethical in aim and purpose, and hence act more and more dynamically upon the moral evolution. The greatest force making for a truer and higher morality in the world to-day is political democracy.[17]