Patience was needed by the hunter, and still more by the laboring squaw; gratitude sprang from the great need—and rarity—of mercy or service; and hospitality is always found in proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of traveling. Courage, as the preeminent virtue of manhood, rose to this prominence later in history, under conditions of constant warfare.
Where you have to meet danger, and your danger is best overcome by courage, by that necessity courage becomes a virtue. It has not been deemed a virtue in women, because it was not a necessity. They were not allowed to face outer danger; and what dangers they had were best escaped by avoidance and ingenuity. Amusingly enough, since the woman's main danger came through her "natural protector"—man; and since her skill and success in escaping from or overcoming him was naturally not valued by him, much less considered a necessity; this power of evasion and adaptation in woman has never been called a virtue. Yet it is just as serviceable to her as courage to the man, and therefore as much a virtue.
Honesty is a modern virtue. It existed, without a name and without praise, among savages; but its place among virtues comes with the period of commercial life. Without some honesty, no commerce; it is absolutely necessary to keep the world going; its absence in any degree is a social injury; therefore we extol honesty and seek to punish dishonesty, as the savage never thought of doing.
All men are not honest in this commercial period, nor were all men brave in the period of warfare: but they all agree in praising the virtue most needed at the time.
Truth, as a special virtue, is interesting to study. The feeling of trust in the word of another is of great value, under some conditions. Under what conditions? In slavery? No. Truthfulness is evidently not advantageous to slaves, for they do not manifest, or even esteem that quality.
Those same Spartans, to whom courage and endurance stood so high, thought but little of truth and honesty, and taught their boys to steal. In warfare trickery and robbery are part of the game.
Where do we find the "word of honour" most valued? Among gentlefolk and nobles, and those who inherit their traditions and impulses. It is conditioned upon freedom and power. You must trust a man's word—when you have no other hold upon him!
Mercy, kindness, "humanity"—as we quite justifiably call it,—is a very young virtue, growing with social growth. Cruelty was once the rule; now the exception. The more inextricably our lives are interwoven in the social fabric, the more we need the mutual love which is the natural state of social beings; and this feeling becoming a necessity, it also becomes a virtue. Similarly, as our lives depend on the presence and service of other animals we need to be kind to them; and in our highest development so far, kindness to animals has been elected virtue.
But of all virtues made of necessity, none is more glaringly in evidence than the one we call "virtue" itself,—chastity. We call it "virtue" because it is the quality—and the only quality—which has been a necessity to the possessor—woman. Her life depended absolutely on man. He valued her in one relation, and in that relation demanded this one thing;—that she serve him alone.
Because of this demand, to her an absolute necessity, we have developed the virtue of chastity, and praised it above all others—in woman! But in men it was not even considered a virtue, much less demanded and enforced.