EUGENICS AND WAR 419 



granted at once that not all wlio are killed are the pick of our race, 

 albeit they may be nobler in their death than many whose safety they 

 have secured will ever be in their life, but is there any getting past the 

 fact that we are exposing to abnormally great risks enormous bodies of 

 men to whose composition there has gone a high proportion of the ad- 

 venturous, the chivalrous, the virile, and the simply brave ? The num- 

 bers must be borne in mind. When many brave unmarried soldiers 

 are killed, we are justified in saying that the natural inheritance of 

 the country is the poorer through the loss of many who should have en- 

 riched the next generation by more than their example. But this might 

 mean relatively little to the stock if the proportion of combatants to non- 

 combatants was small. It is far otherwise in the present instance. It 

 is said that there are in Britain about 6,250,000 men between 18 and 45, 

 13,8 of the total population; if we have, as may be necessary, an army 

 of three millions, that would mean almost every second man between 

 18 and 45. Even if it were every second man by lot, the thinning 

 might mean only a terrible mortality, but if the fitter join the army in 

 larger numbers and are thinned in larger proportions, war must be 

 regarded as a dysgenic eliminator. 



It is said that military training has such marked beneficial effects 

 that it counterbalances many losses and disablements, and no one would 

 deny the value of the drill, the discipline, the plain food, the regular 

 hours and all that. But in the realm of life we can not make simple 

 equations of this sort ; non-transmissible modifications can not be pitted 

 against innate qualities. Even supposing that all the modifications 

 acquired in the training period are to the good, which they are not, we 

 do not thereby lessen the loss to the natural inheritance of the race 

 likely to be involved in the thinning of Lord Kitchener's army, which 

 includes some of the best brains we have got. 



There is another way in which the war is likely to have a dysgenic 

 influence — by handicapping the more individuated. Many of the com- 

 batants will never return; many will be maimed and many enfeebled 

 (in spite of the remarkably increased control of disease) ; but most, we 

 hope, will come safely home. It is too much to expect, however, that 

 they will find things as they left them. Everything promised will be 

 done, we hope, but with the best will in the world things can not be as 

 they were before. Hundreds of millions will have been spent unpro- 

 ductively and there will be need for many economies. This will select 

 in the wrong direction, preventing marriage and so forth, for it will 

 most affect the hiffhlv skilled whose work is of a kind that can be more 

 or less readily dispensed with. 



Eugenics and war — the clash between ideals and things as they are, 

 is, perhaps, nowhere more terrible than here. For eugenics makes for 

 the maintenance and improvement of the hereditary good qualities of 



