Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/496

 490 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

The stock presentation of the case is well illustrated by the following from an editorial in the Saturday Evening Post:

Competition — ^the straggle to the death for life and hope — ^is not, in most of its enter manifestations, a pretty thing. If any man had invented it he would have got hard words from the Utopian, bat it happens to have been in- vented by the Creator of AU Things and to be the motive power in evolationary advancement from the first Protozoan to Shakespeare.

It would be hard to find in equal space a more fallacious collocation of ideas. Competition is not necessarily '^a straggle to the death''; hope is not its object; to proclaim it as an inyention of the Creator is merely an appeal to religious prejudice^ and it has not been the motive power in evolutionary advancement " from the first Protozoan to Shake- speare.'' It would be easy to show directly the fallacies of such reason- ing. They will appear^ however^ in the course of this discussion if it be kept in mind that war is itself a form of competition. Anything ap- plicable to the one subject is therefore applicable to the other.* We shall confine our attention here to the law of the survival of the fittest as it relates to the subject of war.

For an illustration of the current teachings concerning the necessity of war as evidenced by the biological law of evolution, we turn to Bem- hardi's book on *' Germany and the Next War." It offers by no means the only example of such teachings; current articles in English and American periodicals on the nature of war and the necessity of prepared- ness would serve our purpose quite as well ; but it happens to be at hand and all we need is a definite and formal statement of the doctrines to be discussed. Says Bemhardi :

War is a biological necessity of the first importance^ a regalative element in the life of mankind which can not be dispensed with since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore aU real civilization. ''War is the father of all things." The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recognized this.

He quotes with approval the following from Claus Wagner's *' Der Krieg als schaffendes Weltprinzip " :

The natural law, to which aU laws of Nature can be reduced, is the law of struggle. All intrasodal property, all thoughts, inventions, and institutions, as indeed, the social system itself, are a result of the intrasodal struggle, in which one survives and another is cast out. The extrasocial, the supersocial, struggle which guides the external development of sodeties, nations and races, is war. The internal development, the intrasodal struggle, is man's daily work — ^the struggle of thoughts, feelings, wishes, sdences, activities. The outward develop- ment, the supersocial struggle, is the sanguinary struggle of nations — war.

an extended discussion of competition, natural and industrial
 * See Howerth, I. W., "Work and Life/' Chap. V., New Tork, ldl2, for

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