Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/95

, trying to produce the champion horse or cow, you select from your colts or calves the finest specimens, and breed them; the others you slaughter or sterilize. The average cow new-caught by the barbarians from the wild herds of the European steppes probably gave only a gallon or so of milk a day. We have cows which give their dozen gallons of milk a day; and they have been evolved from the wild steppe-cow by nothing else than this long process of selective breeding. Now if it were an object to do so, breeders could take their herds of big, strong, twelve-gallon Holsteins and breed them back to the scrubby little one-gallon-cow. They need simply to reverse the process—make it impossible for the fine specimens to breed, and produce their calves, generation after generation, from the scrubs.

Modern war—conscription plus increased killing power—does exactly this with the males of the human species, You introduce universal service. Every young man, usually at the age of twenty, is drafted into the standing army for a service of two or three years. Gathered in the barracks, these conscripts are examined. Those not fit for military service, on mental and physical tests, are thrown out—in other words, the deformed, the half-witted or under-brained, the narrow-chested, the abnormally weak-muscled, the tuberculous—the culls of the breed. These culls are free to go their way, to marry if they wish, to become fathers. The rest are generally forbidden to marry until they have performed their