Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make
up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these
further barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that
predaceous temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure
they are not primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much
direct economic bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic
evolution to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They
are of importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the economic
exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent important as
being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or diminish the economic
serviceability of the individual.
As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests
itself in two main directions--force and fraud. In varying degrees these
two forms of expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in the
pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes
are cultivated and strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the
more serious forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in the
chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop into
finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating, hold a
well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest
and in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire, and
the minute technical regulations governing the limits and details of
permissible fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact
that fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents
are not adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case
habituation to sports should conduce to a fuller development of
the aptitude for fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that
predatory temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence
of sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and under
any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a narrowly
self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on
the economic value of this feature of the sporting character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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