WAR SELECTION IN WESTERN EUROPE 149 



to complete the number of men which they ought to furnish as young soldiers 

 of sufficient height and vigor according to proportion of their population. 



Eunning nearly parallel with the fluctuation in number of exemptions for 

 undersize is the fluctuation in number of exemptions for infirmities. These 

 exemptions increased by one third 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 vigor than in 

 its aspect of producing a lessening stature. 



It is sometimes claimed that military selection is of biological advantage 

 to the race as a purifier by fire. This might indeed be true if it were the 

 whole population that was exposed. But it is only a certain part of it that is 

 so exposed, a part chosen on a basis of conditions very pertinent to racial in- 

 tegrity. For in the first place it is composed exclusively of men, its removal 

 thus tending to disturb the sex-equilibrium of the population, and to prevent 

 normal and advantageous sexual selection. Next, these men are all of them 

 of greatest sexual vigor and fecundity. Finally they are all men, none of 

 whom fall below and most of whom exceed a certain desirable standard of 

 physical vigor and freedom from infirmity and disease. 



War's selection is exercised on an already selected part of the population. 

 And every death in war means the death of a man physically superior to at 

 least some other man retained in the civil population. For the actual figures 

 of present-day recruitment in the great European states show that of the men 

 gathered by conscription, as in France and Germany, or by voluntary enlist- 

 ment, as in Great Britain, from 40 to 50 per centum are rejected by the exam- 

 ining boards as unfit for service because of undersize, infirmities, or disease. 

 Nor is it necessary that these selected men be actually removed by death 

 in order that militarism may effect its deplorable racial hurt. For this re- 

 moval even for a comparatively short time of a considerable body of these men 

 from the reproductive duties of the population, and their special exposure to 

 injury and disease — disease, we shall see, of a particularly dangerous character 

 to the race — is in itself a factor sufficient to make military selection a real and 

 dangerous thing. 



Death in war comes not always nor even most often in battle. It comes 

 more often from disease. And disease, until very recent years, and even now 

 except in the armies of certain few countries, has stricken and still strikes sol- 

 diers not only in war time but in the pipingest time of peace. And, what is 

 almost worse for the individual and decidedly so for the race, its stroke is less 

 often death than permanent infirmity. The constant invaliding home of the 

 broken-down men to join the civil population is one of the most serious dys- 

 genic features of militarism. 



In the French army in France, Algeria, and Tunis in the thirteen-year 

 period 1872-1884, with a mean annual strength of 413,493 men, the mean 

 annual cases of typhoid were 11,640, or one typhoid case to every 36 soldiers! 

 In the middle of the last century the mortality among the armies on peace 

 footing in France, Prussia, and England was almost exactly 50 per cent, 

 greater than among the civil population. When parts of the armies were 

 serving abroad, especially if in the tropics, the mortality was greatly increased. 

 In 1877 the deaths from phthisis in the British army were two to one in the 

 civil population. And how suggestive this is, when we recall that the examin- 

 ing boards reject all obviously phthisis-tainted men from the recruits. The 

 proportion was still three to two as late as 1884. In the last war of our own 



