Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/101

 fathers were away in the trenches or dead. Those fathers were the flower of Europe, physically and mentally; meantime, the weaklings, rejected by the recruiting offices, remained at home, breeding their vitiated blood into the strain. That was a loss to the race. Probably these items just about balance one another, and we get in the civilian losses an average of the mental and physical strength of the European breed.

In the ten million soldiers lies the dead loss. Take France, who suffered most heavily of all. She had nearly a million and three-quarters men killed in action, died of wounds and “missing in action.” But that does not tell the whole story. Of her young soldiers between nineteen and thirty-one years of age, about sixty per cent died in the war. While statistics are not yet compiled on this special point, it is doubtful if this glorious young company left nearly so much as an average of one child apiece. In the absolute, Germany lost more heavily, in the relative less heavily; she counts two million killed or missing in action or dead of wounds. And if we should hand over the human race to a breeder, to improve by the same methods he uses to improve a breed of horses, these are precisely the million and a half or two millions whom he would have chosen from the men of France and Germany for his purpose.

This reduction of the strength in the European breed through the selective conscription system, plus