disastrous to Great Britain. Nations with conscript armies prepared in peace and drawn from the whole people suffer a loss of life roughly distributed over all classes. That is not so with us. The old standing army of the United Kingdom supplied the whole of the original Expeditionary Force, which endured the great retreat from Mons and helped to turn the German tide at the Marne. Of that Force but little remains. Its proportional casualties up to the present have been far higher than those of the new armies which succeeded it. Our old Regular Army depended on the spirit of public service. It was officered chiefly from the class of the landed gentry, reinforced by families of professional soldiers among whom the calling of arms was almost hereditary. For them the loss of life has been appallingly heavy. The roll of honour of the first year of war contained name after name renowned in the history of the country; and family after family of proved value has been almost or quite destroyed in the male line. It is a known fact that in the last forty years the average number of children in the families of distinguished military officers had decreased more than in almost any other class. The number of only sons was exceptionally great; and hence it is probable that more of the regular army families have been wiped out than of those of almost any other kind.

To the old Regular Army succeeded the Territorials, comprising a wider range of classes, but again, within those classes, selected from the men who had enough spirit of public service to give up their time and energy through long years of unadventurous peace and prosperity. And then came the New Army. The present writer had something to do with selecting and recommending for commissions present and past members of one of the old Universities. In eighteen months some three thousand applications were dealt with. In the rush of the first few weeks came the brightest and best of the young men; in the First Hundred Thousand' they went to the front, and many of them have already fallen. Once more we see that our old voluntary system led to the exposure of the best to the heaviest risk. The men of spirit, of imagination, of patriotism, rushed forward first; and from them the heaviest toll of life

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has been taken. By the second winter of the war, while service was still voluntary, a miserable remnant of the University alone was left in residence, made up of the war-useless old, the unsound in body rejected by the doctors, and the unsound in spirit, who, for one reason or another, had no stomach for the fight-a true survival of the worst.

And here we may note that even inside the Army, from our own present standpoint, the casualties have been comparatively heaviest among those of special racial value. Firstly, the death-rate among officers has been nearly double that among privates and N.C.O.'s; and among officers it is especially young company officers who have suffered. For the immediate needs of the army a General may be of transcendent value, and the comparative security of divisional head-quarters of real military importance. But the General has probably a middle-aged wife at home, and is unlikely to have many more children to inherit the qualities which won him his position. The future fathers are to be found in the trenches; and every promising subaltern killed may racially be worth many Generals.

When we turn to the other argument which is used by the pacifist-the alleged evils of military training and barrack life-we get a subject much more susceptible of definite conclusions. Here we have to distinguish sharply between the racial effects of a standing, long-service army, and of a scheme of general national service in which all sound men are trained for two or three years and then return to civil life to form the enormous reserve with which alone modern wars can be waged. In the passage we have quoted, Darwin refers to conscription; but his arguments are chiefly valid, not against universal conscription, but against a long-service standing army, the soldiers of which are discouraged from marriage during all their best years. In a short-service army the period of absence is too brief to do more than postpone the average age of marriage by a year or two. Yet much of pacifist denunciation of armies, such as that of Starr Jordan, rests on a blind confusion between these two quite different things.

A more serious evil is the prevalence in some armies,

especially in the past, of contagious diseases. But, as the recent Report of the Royal Commission on these diseases shows, the admissions to hospital from this cause in the Army in the United Kingdom fell from 275 per thousand in the year 1885, and 224.5 in 1888, to 212 in 1890 (from which date the figures are strictly comparable), and in 1912 had fallen to 57 per thousand. It is worth noting also that admissions to hospital from all diseases fell from 700-9 per thousand in 1888 to 346-4 in 1912. Thus it is clear that the health of the army had rapidly and continuously improved before the Great War began.

As to the beneficial general effect of military training there can hardly be a doubt. One has only to watch the improvement that occurs in a batch of recruits to see its good results. The improvement in physique, in mental alertness, in self-respect-and consequently, one must add, in manners-cannot be overlooked. Even from the point of view of national economics, it is probable that the country gains by putting a man through military training more than it loses by the intermission of his industrial activity. These benefits are not solely due to better physical conditions. The unreserved dedication of a man's self to the service of King and country, the offer of his life, if need be, at the call of duty, has a definite and cumulative ennobling effect. Honour paid to the soldier has a very real basis, and is of special value in a country like England, where a sordid commercialism has far too much influence. But these considerations, conclusive though they be against some of the more foolish pacifist illusions, have perhaps little bearing on our immediate subject. Acquired improvements, like most acquired disabilities, while worthy of all effort for other reasons, are not hereditary, and have no direct, though perhaps a very real indirect, effect on the race.

It is, of course, impossible to get or use statistical information of final value about the present war till we know the full tale of our losses. Major Darwin has outlined to the Royal Statistical Society the enquiries which should then be put in hand. The racial damage to the nation should be estimated by examining not only the deaths but also the probable number and quality of children that would have been born had those deaths not occurred; by examining the death-rate as a

rough measure of the physical state of the nation till other physical measurements become available; by examining the changes in the birth-rate produced by the war in different strata of society. Then the indirect economic effects produced by the ascertained deterioration of the average innate qualities of the nation should be a subject of statistical study. Not only are the totally incompetent a burden on the rest of the community, but the less competent tend to reduce the efficiency of the more competent, as, for instance, when the normal rate of day wages depends largely on the value of the day's work possible to the least effective workman employed.

The difficulties in the way of such statistical research, though great, are not insuperable; and the Government should see to it that they are put in hand when peace comes and the data can be obtained.

We must now pass to the consideration of possible remedies for the loss and destruction of life caused by the war. How can its wastage be replaced?

To a certain extent the remedy is in our own hands. The voluntary restriction of the birth-rate, which has been going on since 1876, has deprived us of many more lives than the war will cost. We may estimate that in Great Britain at least ten million more children would have been born had the natural birth-rate continued; at the present time about half a million more births a year would be expected. With this limit, our population is expansible at will.

The voluntary restriction of births is chiefly responsible for the number of families who are now mourning the loss of only sons. To individuals-even to familiesit may be too late to undo the mischief. But to the classes affected as a whole the lesson is plain. And to some extent it has been learnt. 'War-weddings' are in the experience of all of us, where parental consent would not have been forthcoming in peace time. The desire for pecuniary safety in the present and expectations in the future has become a less insistent motive when the failure of heirs and the extinction of the family is seen to be a very real peril, which no accumulation of capital can avert. In other classes, war excitement and plentiful employment produced a similar effect. This is shown

by the fact that for the quarter ending Sept. 30, 1915, the marriage-rate was the highest ever recorded for England and Wales-21.8 per thousand as compared with 173, the average figure for the past ten years. The birth-rate continued to fall until the last quarter of 1915, when it reached 19.5 per thousand, the lowest point on record. But since then it, too, has begun to rise, and for the quarter ending Sept. 30, 1916, was 21.7 per thousand. The restriction of the birth-rate is not solely or even mainly an economic question. A psychological attitude of mind is also involved; in many circles it is largely an affair of mere fashion. Nevertheless, economic causes are largely at work; and it is through economic action, and its reflex effect on psychology, that the State can chiefly work. Laissez faire, in this as in other directions, will produce its natural results. Children, like wheat, have been considered an affair for the individual, and the State has not stepped in to encourage their production. When it is to the interest of the individual, the acreage of wheat diminishes and fewer children are born. But we are coming to realise the incompleteness of the theory that the State is best served by allowing individual interest free play. In many cases the interests of the individual and those of the State are sharply divergent. If the State wants more wheat or children than the interest of the individual will supply, the State must pay an adequate price, or inflict a sufficient penalty. In all discussions on the economic causes of the fall in the birth-rate certain facts must be borne in mind. At present, one of the classes with the largest birth-rate is that of the unskilled labourer with low and uncertain wages. As we rise to the class of the skilled and highly paid artisan, the birth-rate falls, while it is also exceptionally low in the higher professional classes enjoying comparatively large incomes. Hence it is often argued that all economic action is useless, that a higher and more regular standard of life leads to a fall in the birthrate, and therefore that an improvement in the lot of parents affords no hope of more children.

But, if the State decides to subsidise the production of children, it must, as in other cases, take the commonsense precaution of seeing that the goods are delivered. It is useless to improve wages or housing accommodation