THE SELECTIVE INFLUENCE OF WAR 217 



event of a great war ending in the complete victory of one side, 

 will disappear in the sense that it will have no descendants, yet 

 the number of its descendants depends very largely on wars and 

 menaces of war. The country that secures the best of the earth 

 will send out more colonists than the country that has to send its 

 sons to live among foreigners and speak a strange language." 



Results such as are here described have probably been produced 

 in a few cases, but it is doubtful if many of the wars that have 

 been waged in modern Europe have worked out in this way. So 

 far as any racial effects are evident it is not improbable that most 

 European wars have been injurious to all parties concerned. 

 However defeat may have influenced national spirit it does not 

 seem to have produced a very obvious effect on the birth rate. 

 The successive defeats sustained by Austria in the igth century 

 have not hindered the rapid growth of her population. A victo- 

 rious career does not affect so much the growth of a people as the 

 expansion of a nation, which is generally a very different thing. 



National boundaries are of interest to the politician and 

 historian, but to the student of racial biology they are mainly 

 a source of confusion. Poland was obliterated as a nation, but, 

 despite a considerable amount of mistreatment, the Poles have 

 continued to multiply at a rate that has given their conquerors 

 a certain amount of uneasiness. It is not to be inferred, however, 

 that it is a matter of indifference from the biological standpoint 

 whether people do or do not constitute a nation. Moreover in 

 Europe at present the divisions of ethnic stocks are so crossed by 

 national boundaries that strife between peoples would throw most 

 countries into a many-sided civil war. 



The studies of the actual effects of war from the viewpoint 

 of group selection is an almost untouched field. The difficulties 

 in the way of adjudging the biological value of the wars that have 

 occurred between civilized states are many and formidable. We 

 know little of the differences in innate mental ability, as distin- 

 guished from cultural development, that exist between the racial 

 elements of civilized countries. There is reason to believe that 

 the more conspicuous temperamental traits that distinguish the 



