Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/423

 Rh granted at once that not all who are killed are the pick of our race, albeit they may be nobler in their death than many whose safety they have secured will ever be in their life, but is there any getting past the fact that we are exposing to abnormally great risks enormous bodies of men to whose composition there has gone a high proportion of the adventurous, the chivalrous, the virile, and the simply brave? The numbers must be borne in mind. When many brave unmarried soldiers are killed, we are justified in saying that the natural inheritance of the country is the poorer through the loss of many who should have enriched the next generation by more than their example. But this might mean relatively little to the stock if the proportion of combatants to non-combatants was small. It is far otherwise in the present instance. It is said that there are in Britain about 6,250,000 men between 18 and 45, 13.8 of the total population; if we have, as may be necessary, an army of three millions, that would mean almost every second man between 18 and 45. Even if it were every second man by lot, the thinning might mean only a terrible mortality, but if the fitter join the army in larger numbers and are thinned in larger proportions, war must be regarded as a dysgenic eliminator.

It is said that military training has such marked beneficial effects that it counterbalances many losses and disablements, and no one would deny the value of the drill, the discipline, the plain food, the regular hours and all that. But in the realm of life we can not make simple equations of this sort; non-transmissible modifications can not be pitted against innate qualities. Even supposing that all the modifications acquired in the training period are to the good, which they are not, we do not thereby lessen the loss to the natural inheritance of the race likely to be involved in the thinning of Lord Kitchener’s army, which includes some of the best brains we have got.

There is another way in which the war is likely to have a dysgenic influence—by handicapping the more individuated. Many of the combatants will never return; many will be maimed and many enfeebled (in spite of the remarkably increased control of disease); but most, we hope, will come safely home. It is too much to expect, however, that they will find things as they left them. Everything promised will be done, we hope, but with the best will in the world things can not be as they were before. Hundreds of millions will have been spent unproductively and there will be need for many economies. This will select in the wrong direction, preventing marriage and so forth, for it will most affect the highly skilled whose work is of a kind that can be more or less readily dispensed with.

Eugenics and war—the clash between ideals and things as they are, is, perhaps, nowhere more terrible than here. For eugenics makes for the maintenance and improvement of the hereditary good qualities of