pearl: biology and war 349 



the common people not only permit them to do so, but follow 

 them with all their energies when once the business is well under 

 way? Some biological facts will help us to understand the 

 answers to these questions. 



The general biological fact of individual variation is, of course, 

 familiar. No two individual animals of any sort, human or 

 other, are precisely alike. Individuals vary or differ among 

 themselves. Of these variations or differences some are super- 

 ficial and transitory, but, on the other hand, many have a deep- 

 rooted and ineradicable germinal basis. Perhaps the most 

 general result of modern genetics is to show the extent to which 

 variations, often slight in their external manifestations, have a 

 definite germinal basis, reappearing unaltered again and again in 

 the successive generations arising from the same germinal stock. 

 The same fact of variation holds equally true in respect of races 

 and national groups, provided in the latter case they have existed 

 as socially isolated entities sufficiently long for a distinct feeling 

 of nationality to develop. The variation in national groups 

 involves, as in the individual, all sorts of characters, psycho- 

 logical, social, and moral, as well as physical. In new nations, 

 changes in the psychological, social, and moral characters 

 appear and become fixed by the process of social inheritance 

 sooner than in the strictly physical characters. The fact is that 

 the groups of people, which, in political terminology, are called 

 nations, in the great majority of cases become rather quickly 

 biologically differentiated if they are not so from the beginning 

 of their national life. A German is different from a frenchman 

 or an Englishman or an Italian. These differences are not merely 

 physical. They involve every mental attitude, appetite, and 

 responsibility, which are the factors governing action. 



To recognize the fact of biological differentiation or variation 

 is in no sense to assert difference of position in the evolutionary 

 scale. There is no evidence that among these larger and more 

 developed national groups it is proper to speak of one as superior 

 or inferior to another. Philosophically, all such comparisons of 

 races or national groups are untenable, for the reason that they 

 all involve by implication comparison or measurement with some 



