Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/103

. We shall, first of all, spare the mothers, the women who have already given their strain to the breed. They are needed in their homes for the vital business of rearing children. We shall take the young unmarried women, and choose from them by scientific test the strongest and most brilliant, rejecting the weakest and most stupid. That process was begun in the late war. The best managed munitions works gave no woman a job until medical and psychological tests proved that she had the body and brains for the work. Just as with the men, we shall send the culls back to civilian life, free to pour their inferior blood into the veins of the new generation.

In the fate war, a few thousands of these superior women, chosen from among the volunteers for munitions workers and for transport drivers in the army zone, died through air raids and long-distance artillery fire. These losses were not great enough to have much effect on the breed. But they pointed the way we are going. In the next war, with its overwhelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions works and the services of the rear will be special objects of attack. There, as at the front, we shall kill by wholesale not by retail, and we shall kill our selected female breeding stack. So to the anti-social effects of the next war we must add one never accomplished before in human history: the sapping of the feminine strength in the human race, as war—even before that great reversal of selective