Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/498

 492 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

fluences of " slothful ease " ; that the " strenuous life/' militarism being often implied if not expressed by that phrase, is the highest manifesta- tion of the true grandeur of man and of nations ? Merely this, that it mistakes the necessity of social action for the necessity of a particular kind of action, that is, war, and betrays a misconception of the laws of evolution or a painful indifference to the social consequences of the epi- grammatical expression of half-truths. Action is a necessity both of individual and of social life. We must act if we would live, and it is commendable to rouse nations to intelligent action, but it does not fol- low from this that nations are under the inevitable necessity of making war upon one another. We Americans, for instance, must manifest activity or we shall stagnate, but we need not on that account intervene in Mexico or provoke war with the Japanese. We have enough to do at home to evoke all the activity and all the intelligence of which we are capable. There are, and will always be, problems of production, distri- bution, education, sanitation. Concerted action in swatting the fly or killing mosquitoes, to say nothing of organized action to redeem our arid lands, to reforest our devastated hills, and to harvest the riches of moun- tains and plains, affords ample opportunity for the exercise of all our energies, are in reality far more dignified occupations than the destruc- tion of property and life in war, and the glory to be won therefrom will eclipse the showy nonsense of war if society ever awakens from its pres- ent illusion. The struggle for existence, we repeat, does not necessarily involve war. Man can be strenuous without being destructive.

But, while war is only an incident in the struggle for existence and might therefore be eliminated without serious interference with that struggle, yet, on the whole and in general, it results in the survival of the fittest. Is this not a sufficient reason why it should not be abolished, even if it were possible for society to do so ? Would not continuous peace among nations necessitate the abrogation of the law of the survival of the fittest and defeat the progress which is achieved by such survival ? Let us consider this question squarely on its merits. We shall see that the fact that war does admittedly result in the survival of the fittest is no reason whatever why war should be condoned or encouraged.

First, let us observe that evolution is not necessarily progressive, that it may lead to degradation, as in the case of the parasite, as well as to the development of a paragon of strength and beauty. The downfall of the Roman Empire was as much a phenomenon of social evolution as the rise of the Dutch republic. In the evolutionary process the sur- vivors are indeed the fittest, but the fittest are not necessarily the best; they are not always better from an ethical standpoint than those whom they supplant; they are merely those who are best adapted to the pre- vailing conditions. Of course no one who really understands the doc- trine of evolution needs instruction on this point. Spencer long ago

�� �