Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/486

482 drained, on the whole, neither the best nor the worst of the racial stock, but has been an outlet for the intractable members of society. Wild, ungovernable boys, hoodlums in the making, men with the bloodlust still strong in them—such have joined the army and entered the navy through the centuries. The great mercenary forces, recruited so long throughout Europe, did not deprive civilization of men in whom the social virtues were strongly marked. The professional military class has always absorbed—and utilized to advantage, indeed—the men that in the freedom of a purely commercial régime would have been so much explosive material.

This is not to deny, it is admitted, that war has often resulted in retrogression through unfavorable selection. But the peace advocates reveal the one-sidedness of their argument by a too frequent appeal to examples of revolution and internal rebellion, like the French Revolution and the Civil War in the United States, where members of the superior and ruling classes were lopped off, or where enormous masses of enthusiastic volunteers were enlisted from the citizenship. If war had committed such ravages in the human stock as these pacificists maintain, it might be supposed that there would have been a decline in the fighting force of civilized men. But the very opposite is true. Modern men are braver and steadier, make better soldiers, than did the men of antiquity. The reason is that the same moral qualities which have been selected through the elimination of the anti-social, are, in part, the virtues which make the best armies—such virtues as obedience, the habit of discipline, self-control and steadfastness. And, curiously enough, in the breeding out of the opposite qualities, the predatory disposition, irresponsibility and refractoriness, the unbroken existence of the military organization has played its part.

Another prominent factor in socialized selection comes under the head of vice and racial poisons. No argument is required to prove that persons who indulge in sexual excesses, in drunkenness, in drug habits, in debauchery of any kind, are anti-social, lacking the moral stamina which would make them, say, self-supporting individuals contributing their share to the social income. Our point is that vice, in the degree of indulgence, is also eliminative. Sexual excesses, for example, sap energy, weaken resistance to disease, and predispose to early death. The more licentious a man or woman, the greater are his or her chances of contracting a venereal disease. Gonorrhea and syphilis, where they do not kill, tend to sterilize. Consequently those who can not, through lack of self-control or excessive lust, conform to social and ethical standards of purity, cripple themselves in reproductive power. Prostitutes, a big population in every country, every age, bear few, if any, children.