Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/100

 it begins to go decadent, to find its force sapped. Spain, lord of the world up to the seventeenth century, holding her power by means of the famous Spanish infantry, "the wall which repaired its own breaches," suddenly faded away until by the nineteenth century she was the football of Europe. But the off-hand recruiting systems of those old days could not possibly hit the breed as hard as our modern method of scientific conscription. Just as technically-improved war has worked toward greater and greater property-destruction, so has it worked toward greater and greater race-destruction.

The thirty million civilians deprived of life by Armageddon probably struck about the average level of the breed. Those who died of starvation or exhaustion in the great treks before the advancing hordes of the late war were below that average. These flights were primitive struggles for existence, wherein the weakest died first. Without quite the same certainty, we may say that those who died of malnutrition and the epidemics directly engendered by war were somewhat below average. That—to be perfectly cold-blooded—was a gain to the race. But the unborn—for the most part they never came into this world because their