As Prof. Ripley pointed out in 1900 in his great book The Races of Europe':

To an American the apparent unwillingness of some of the Germans boldly to own up to the radical ethnic differences which exist between the north and south of the Empire is incomprehensible. It seems to be not improbable that the Teutonic (i.e. northern) blond race has so persistently been apotheosised by the Germans themselves as the original Aryan civilizer of Europe, that to acknowledge any other racial descent has come to be considered as a confession of humble origin. . . . At all events the attempt is constantly being made to prove that the ethnic contrasts between north and south are the product of environmental influences, and not a heritage from widely different ancestry' (p. 221).

Now let us turn to the other side of the case, and examine some of the arguments which are adduced to prove the harmful racial effects of war. We may begin with the summary of these arguments given by Charles Darwin. In the Descent of Man,' Darwin says:

In every country in which a standing army is kept up, the fairest young men are taken to the conscription camp or are enlisted. They are thus exposed to early death during war or are often tempted into vice, and are prevented from marrying during the prime of life. On the other hand, the shorter and feebler men with poor constitutions are left at home, and consequently have a much better chance of marrying and propagating their kind.'

This statement is of course not a complete analysis. It ignores the undoubted benefits of military training, benefits less spoilt by counterbalancing evils than when Darwin wrote. Moreover, as Mr Coulton points out, Darwin confuses the evils of a conscript system, which in modern times means short service, with those of a 'standing' or long-service army.

Nevertheless, here we have clearly set forth the chief cause which must lead in the direction of racial degeneration in any nation which is exposed to the long drain of its manhood imposed by the present war. Whether it conquers its enemies or is itself defeated, Darwin's statement remains a true expression of an unavoidable tendency, which has been enlarged on but not made

more clear by the superficial treatment of Mr Norman Angell, Chancellor Starr Jordan, and others. The army needs our best, and, when national existence is at stake, we give it our best freely. In a serious war, a large proportion of the best are killed, and the next generation has a larger proportion than it should have of fathers who have been rejected as unfit for military service. Heredity does the rest. While a group of congenitally defective fathers may have a number of satisfactory children, conclusive evidence shows that that number will be less than if the fathers had been chosen from good stock. On the whole the quality of the next generation is lowered even though the mothers are sound; and the nation is for ever the poorer in an unknown degree by the loss of the continually broadening stream of descendants of the noble lives sacrificed to war.

This process of bad selection must necessarily occur. It only remains to estimate its importance; to weigh it, if we can, against the effects of the tendencies in the better direction insisted on by the advocates of war as of racial value; and finally to point out some ways by which the harmful process may perhaps be rendered less destructive. It is not enough to insist on the undoubted fact that such racial loss is a necessary consequence of war. It is as easy for Mr Norman Angell and other pacifists to enlarge on this theme as it is for a German professor to wax eloquent on the benefits to be inflicted on an unwilling world by German conquest. For a pacifist to proclaim his hatred of a soldier and state some of the obvious evils of war, is not to prove that the total effect of war is bad for the human race, or even if it is, that war can be avoided with either safety or honour.

What definite evidence is available of the effects of war on mankind as a race? Can we obtain any quantitative estimate of its results? Are we in a position to calculate any of its future influences on the innate qualities of the human species?

Several observers, especially de Lapouge, have investigated the question by considering the very full details which are accessible about the French conscripts of different years. Such results have been summarised recently by Prof. Kellogg. From five to ten million men were probably lost to Europe during the wars of the

French Revolution and Empire. Perhaps one-third of the losses were suffered by France, then containing a population of some twenty-five millions. A serious proportion of the men of military age were destroyed, and a much larger proportion of those sound and fit for military service. Thus from 1792 onwards an increasing number of the best of Frenchmen were removed from family life, and the average quality of those left behind to become the fathers of children steadily fell. How did this affect the physical characters of the children born? We can try to answer this question by examining the data of the French Government concerning the number of men examined, and accepted or rejected for military service each year. Prof. Kellogg says:

'From these figures it may be stated with confidence that the average height of the men of France began notably to decrease with the coming of age, in 1813 and on, of the young men born in the years of the Revolutionary wars (1792-1802), and that it continued to decrease in the following years with the coming of age of the youths born during the Wars of the Empire. Soon after the cessation of these terrible mandraining wars, . . . a new type of boys began to be born, boys indeed that had in them an inheritance of stature that carried them, by the time of their coming of age in the later 1830's and 1840's, to a height of one inch greater than that of the earlier generations born in war time. The average height of the annual conscription contingents born during the Napoleonic Wars was about 1625 millimetres; of those born after the wars it was about 1655 millimetres.

'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 onethird 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 vigour, than in its aspect of producing a lessening of stature.'

These results, as they stand, do not prove the case with the completeness Prof. Kellogg seems to think. The quick recovery of stature after the cessation of war

suggests that the evil effect may be transient; and further analysis is necessary. Of the fathers of children born after 1815, some were soldiers returned from the wars, and some were young men newly married. Of the latter some were born before the Revolutionary Wars began; and both these men and also the returned soldiers were not selected for their bad qualities, as were the parents left behind by conscription during the years 1792-1815. We have, therefore, as explaining the recovery, a valid reason which is consistent with a continued inheritance of evil effects from the war; but whether that reason is enough of itself to explain the facts cannot be determined with certainty. Another possibility must also be faced. It might be said that the conditions of life were unfavourable to the nurture of infants during the war, and that anxiety and distress were a bad preparation for childbirth, so that, heredity apart, children born during those years had a bad start. This may well explain some of their defects when they came to be examined as recruits twenty years later.

Could we disentangle all these causes and trace their exact effects, it is possible, nay probable, that we should still find clear proof of permanent racial degeneration. But the problem is too complex for solution with the data at our disposal, and we are inclined to think that, on the evidence of the French Revolutionary Wars, the case is not proven. The same conclusion follows a study of the figures which represent the similar results of the war of 1870-1. Lapouge points out that the 'class' summoned to the colours in 1891, and born in 1871, was lower in average stature than that of 1887. There was again a recovery after the war. But, once more, while it is certain that children born during the war were inferior to those born before and after, there is no conclusive evidence of lasting racial deterioration from the data available. In this instance, too, the case is not proven. But this, it must be emphasised, does not mean that war is not guilty. The presumption is that continuing harm is done to the race; deductive reasoning from the known facts of heredity leads to that conclusion; and the onus of proof rests on those who hold that the evil is transient.

There is one other consideration which must not be

overlooked in an analysis of the problem. Any biological race seems to possess a normal type; and divergencies from that type of a merely fluctuational character tend to diminish as generation follows generation. A father four inches above the average height tends to have sons who exceed it by perhaps only two inches, while his grandsons revert still more nearly to the normal. The same is true if he is of low stature, and it is probable that some hereditary defects which exclude a man from the army may work out slowly in the same manner, especially as the selection of war does not touch women as it does men. Moreover, many defects which unfit a man for active service are not hereditary at all.

But it is not likely that all hereditary qualities are of a fluctuational nature. If a good character is a true mutation and Mendelian phenomena appear, it might well be that the premature death of its possessors in one generation would deprive the race of its benefits altogether until the shuffling and reshuffling of Mendelian units produced it once more in future ages. Even if we grant the possible re-establishment of normal racial qualities in the course of many generations, who can measure the inestimable harm and loss meanwhile? Who can estimate the evil of there being fewer able or competent people left to control the environment and make it fit for the nation to develope in on sound lines? A bad environment means that bad racial qualities tend to survive, and in this way means also indirect harm to the race. Moreover, who can say that another and still more dreadful war may not be upon us before we have recovered from the racial injury of this?

At the best, then, it is probable that the deterioration of race from a great national war may be lengthy; at worst it is permanent. In either case, unless countervailing tendencies are brought into play, its effects may be disastrous for our own and many succeeding generations. It does not follow that great wars must not be faced. Racial questions are not the only ones involved. National safety, national honour may be at stake. It might even be that a nation must sacrifice its own racial future for the sake of humanity itself. But let us count the cost, and seek a possible remedy.

In some respects the present war has been especially