WAR SELECTION IN WESTERN EUROPE 151 



Against the credit for redeemed souls I set the cost of armadas and the 

 sacrifice of soldiers and friars sent to the Philippines. And this I count 

 the chief loss; for mines give silver, and forests give timber, but only Spain 

 gives Spaniards, and she may give so many that she may be left desolate, 

 and constrained to bring up strangers' children instead of her own. 



Said a Spanish knight: 



This is Castile, she makes men and wastes them. 



Says Captain Carlos Gilman Calkins: 



This sublime and terrible phrase sums up Spanish history. 



Says Havelock Ellis : 



Everything has happened that could happen to kill out the virile, mili- 

 tant, independent elements of Spanish manhood.-* War alone, if sufficiently 

 prolonged and severe, suffices to deplete the nation of its most vigorous stocks. 

 ' ' The warlike nation of to-day ... is the decadent nation of to-morrow. ' ' 

 The martial ardor and success of the Spaniards lasted for more than a thousand 

 years. It was only at very great cost that the Eomans subdued the Iberians 

 and down to the sixteenth century, the Spaniards were great soldiers. The 

 struggle in the Netherlands wasted their energies and then finally at Eocroy, in 

 the middle of the seventeenth century, the Spanish infantry that had been 

 counted the finest in Europe went down before the French, the military splen- 

 dor of Spain vanished" ("The Soul of Spain"). 



It is a question whether Spain suffered most from the scattering 

 of her strong men over seas, from her perpetual struggles in Europe or 

 from the Inquisition. This sinister institution was more wasteful and 

 more cruel in Spain than anywhere else, leading to the extinction of 

 independent minds and of virile intellectuality. 



In Spain as in France, the continuance of peace with the cessation 

 of the loss and waste over seas is bringing a financial and industrial 

 recuperation, which must be slowly followed by a physical and moral 

 advance. It is claimed that Spain now enjoys " an intellectual and 

 artistic renaissance that will make her memorable when her heroes are 

 forgotten." 



Germany 



Germany suffered perhaps scarcely less than France from the wars 

 of Louis XIV. and of the two Napoleons. German writers, however, 

 have been much less frank than the French and also less lucid in dis- 

 cussing their national disabilities. They have given but scanty records 

 of the racial waste their wars have involved. Moreover, the organiza- 

 tion of modern Germany, a socialist state under military domination, 

 has tended to minimize the visible distinctions among racial strains. 

 Every man has his place. It is not easy to fall below one's class, cor- 

 respondingly difficult to rise. Universal compulsory education, tech- 

 nical as well as academic, saves even the feeble from absolute incom- 

 4 In this connection, Mr. Ellis extolls the beauty, grace and spirit of the 

 Spanish women and suggests the theory that so far as feminine traits go, there 

 has been no reversal of selection. "The women of Spain," he thinks, "are on 

 the average superior to the men." 



