Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/424

 a race, while severe and protracted war makes for their impoverishment. There is rough sifting, and the meshes of the sieve are not eugenically determined. How far the impoverishment will go is hidden from us, how far it can be counteracted remains to be seen, and what pluses there are to set against the minuses is a question for careful consideration, but some degree of impoverishment is certain.

We are reminded, however, that the race does not live by the germ-plasm alone, and that war with its terrible sifting may be worth all it costs. But who can predict of any war what all its cost may be? In his famous essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War," William James said eloquently:

Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own, a sacred, spiritual possession, worth more than all the blood poured out.

Perhaps it is so, especially if victory is thrown in! Already in Britain there has been a remarkable widening of sympathies, and waking up to the needs and interests of others.

Every one will agree that there are worse things than war—such as slavery, rottenness, softness, and dishonor; they are worse even than extinction. Let us admit that war may help "to preserve our ideals of hardihood," "to protect human nature against its weaker and more cowardly self," "to keep heroism and the martial virtues alive," and even to re-impress us with the imperativeness of eugenics, but in these concessions let us not admit that there are not tasks of peace capable of evoking and disciplining an equal hardihood and heroism. Let us not seek to conceal the fact that war, biologically regarded, means wastage and a reversal of eugenic or rational selection, since it prunes off a disproportionately large number of those whom the race can least afford to lose.

Let us turn to another question, which concerns the struggle for existence. In spite of many protests, beginning with Darwin’s, there is a widespread belief that Nature’s message to man is: "Each for himself, and extinction take the hindmost," "contention is the vital force," careers are open to talons. There is indeed a measure of truth here, for we undoubtedly see much stern sifting in wild Nature, much redness of tooth and claw, extraordinary infantile and juvenile mortality, and, apart from parasitism, a ceaseless condemnation of the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.

But when we look into matters more closely we find that we have not been careful enough either as regards Nature or Darwin’s interpretation of it. For the struggle for existence, in and by which Nature