What struck us most was an institution peculiar to them and to the Kite Indians, further to the westward, from whom it is said to have been copied.  It is an association of the most active and brave young men, who are bound to each other by attachment, secured by a vow never to retreat before any danger, or to give way to their enemies.  In war they go forward without sheltering themselves behind trees, or aiding their natural valor by any artifice....  These young men sit, and encamp, and dance together, distinct from the rest of the nation; they are generally about thirty or thirty-five years old; and such is the deference paid to courage that their seats in the council are superior to those of the chiefs, and their persons more respected.[185]

The consciousness of the value of male activity is here expressed in an exaggerated degree—­in a degree bordering upon the pathological, since the reckless exposure of life to danger is not necessary to success at a given moment, and is unjustifiable from the standpoint of public safety, unless it be on the side of the suggestive effect of intrepid conduct in creating a general standard of intrepidity.  Similarly, the Indians in general often failed to get the full benefit of a victory, because of their practice that the scalp of an enemy belonged to him who took it, and their pursuits after a rout were checked by the delay of each to scalp his own.

The pedagogical attempts of primitive society, so far as they are applied to boys, have as an end the encouragement of morality of a motor, not a sentimental, type.  The boys are taught war and the chase, and to despise the occupations of women.  Thompson says of the Zulu boys: 

It is a melancholy fact that when they have arrived at a very early age, should their mothers attempt to chastise them, such is the law that these lads are at the moment allowed to kill their mothers.[186]

Ethnologists often make mention of the fact that the natural races do not generally punish children; and while this is due in part to a less definite sense of responsibility, as well as of less nervousness in parents, non-interference is a part of their system of training: 

Instead of teaching the boy civil manners, the father desires him to beat and pelt the strangers who come to the tent; to steal or secrete in joke some trifling article belonging to them; and the more saucy and impudent they are, the more troublesome to strangers and all the men of the encampment, the more they are praised as giving indication of a future enterprising and warlike disposition.[187]

Theft is also encouraged among boys as a developer of their wits.  The Spartan boy and the fox is a classical example; and Diodorus relates that in Egypt the boy who wished to become a thief was required to enrol his name with the captain of the thieves, and to turn over to him all stolen articles.  The citizens who were robbed went to the captain of thieves and recovered their property upon payment of one-fourth of its value.[188] Admiration of a lawless deed often foreruns censure of the deed in consciousness today:  there are few men who do not admire a particularly daring and successful bank or diamond robbery, though they deprecate the social injury done.