"There is no hereditary class of any consequence in the American community, except in the South" (212), noted Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Writing at the close of the nineteenth-century, Veblen observed: "The industrial organization of the South is at present, and especially it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive character than that of the American community taken as a whole" (212). For Veblen, "the peculiar economic circumstances" of this section were in many ways consonant with "the barbarian stages of industrial development" (213). The "barbarian scheme of life" reveals itself in the "archaic character" of the Southern culture. According to Veblen, duels, brawls and feuds, horse racing, cock-fighting and gambling, are less deprecated at the South than elsewhere; and the stress placed on honor, on standing well in the eyes of one's compatriots, is a typical barbarian trait. Veblen defines the state of barbarism as "a consistently warlike habit of life" (24). Two conditions are necessary for the emergence and reproduc tion of barbarian society: (1) "the community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting of large game or both"); and (2) a subsistence economy must be in place "to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a routine of labor" (25). The institution of the leisure class, the seminal characteristic of the barbarian scheme of life, is "the outgrowth of an early discrimination