Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/153

Rh to complete the number of men which they ought to furnish as young soldiers of sufficient height and vigor according to proportion of their population.

Running nearly parallel with the fluctuation in number of exemptions for undersize is the fluctuation in number of exemptions for infirmities. These exemptions increased by one third in twenty years. Exemptions for undersize and infirmities together nearly doubled in number. But the lessening again of the figure of exemptions for infirmities was not so easily accomplished as was that of the figure for undersize. The influence of the Napoleonic Wars was felt by the nation, and revealed by its recruiting statistics, for a far longer time in its aspect of producing a racial deterioration as to vigor than in its aspect of producing a lessening stature.

It is sometimes claimed that military selection is of biological advantage to the race as a purifier by fire. This might indeed be true if it were the whole population that was exposed. But it is only a certain part of it that is so exposed, a part chosen on a basis of conditions very pertinent to racial integrity. For in the first place it is composed exclusively of men, its removal thus tending to disturb the sex-equilibrium of the population, and to prevent normal and advantageous sexual selection. Next, these men are all of them of greatest sexual vigor and fecundity. Finally they are all men, none of whom fall below and most of whom exceed a certain desirable standard of physical vigor and freedom from infirmity and disease.

War's selection is exercised on an already selected part of the population. And every death in war means the death of a man physically superior to at least some other man retained in the civil population. For the actual figures of present-day recruitment in the great European states show that of the men gathered by conscription, as in France and Germany, or by voluntary enlistment, as in Great Britain, from 40 to 50 per centum are rejected by the examining boards as unfit for service because of undersize, infirmities, or disease. Nor is it necessary that these selected men be actually removed by death in order that militarism may effect its deplorable racial hurt. For this removal even for a comparatively short time of a considerable body of these men from the reproductive duties of the population, and their special exposure to injury and disease—disease, we shall see, of a particularly dangerous character to the race—is in itself a factor sufficient to make military selection a real and dangerous thing.

Death in war comes not always nor even most often in battle. It comes more often from disease. And disease, until very recent years, and even now except in the armies of certain few countries, has stricken and still strikes soldiers not only in war time but in the pipingest time of peace. And, what is almost worse for the individual and decidedly so for the race, its stroke is less often death than permanent infirmity. The constant invaliding home of the broken-down men to join the civil population is one of the most serious dysgenic features of militarism.

In the French army in France, Algeria, and Tunis in the thirteen-year period 1872-1884, with a mean annual strength of 413,493 men, the mean annual cases of typhoid were 11,640, or one typhoid case to every 36 soldiers! In the middle of the last century the mortality among the armies on peace footing in France, Prussia, and England was almost exactly 50 per cent, greater than among the civil population. When parts of the armies were serving abroad, especially if in the tropics, the mortality was greatly increased. In 1877 the deaths from phthisis in the British army were two to one in the civil population. And how suggestive this is, when we recall that the examining boards reject all obviously phthisis-tainted men from the recruits. The proportion was still three to two as late as 1884. In the last war of our own