Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/427

 Rh To sum up, man is not bound to follow Nature, but if he does he is not shut up to an imitation of that mode of the struggle for existence in which rats excel, namely internecine competition. And if he does pursue this method, as in war, he can not console himself with the belief that the result will be the survival of the fittest in any desirable sense.

We have considered the fact that serious sustained international war, considered biologically, implies a reversal of rational selection, and we have discussed a widespread misunderstanding due to a narrow conception of the struggle for existence. Let us pass for a little to the proposition that war, biologically regarded, is a return to the most primitive and crude form of the struggle for existence. Looking at this great war socially, we are, as a nation, practically unanimous in the resolution to resist to the uttermost an outrage on civilization, and to stand with our allies at all costs for freedom and justice; we are proud of those who are fighting, enduring, and dying for their country; we know publicly and privately of the virtues to which the war has afforded opportunity among combatants and non-combatants alike. But, admitting all this and more, can we deny that war, biologically regarded, is a return to the rat versus rat mode of the struggle for existence? No escape seems possible.

If this unpalatable fact be true why mention it, since after a certain, or rather uncertain, date in history this war was inevitable? We mention it because it behovesbehooves [sic] us to mingle fear with our pride. The implied reversion brings with it terrible risks, and when we hold up our hands at the frightfulnesses committed by our enemies, we should remember that we are not exempt from the risk of slipping down the rungs of the steep ladder of evolution. In the actual environment of war, as Mr. Theodore Chambers said in his admirable lecture on "Eugenics and the War," "the decent garments of custom are often torn off," and the Berserk discovered; and for those who are not fighting there is also, and less excusably, a tendency to reversion because of our necessary preoccupation with a struggle which, though embellished with the latest scientific devices and illumined with the finest heroism, involves a recrudescence of primitive passion. We may already see the deterioration in ungenerous and inaccurate depreciation of German culture, in unworthy scares, in unkindness to aliens, in suggestions of barbarous reprisals, and so forth. On the whole we are behaving well, yet it may not be amiss to remind ourselves of the solemn biological and psychological fact, that the past lives on in our present, with the risk of "Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud." What sowings