SOME EUGENIC ASPECTS OF WAR 77 



effect, and the benefits would not be cumulative. We must not 

 hastily assume, however, that there would be no indirect racial 

 effects, and this illustrates well the intricate nature of all these 

 problems. Conscription is not universal service, for there is no 

 such thing; the weaker males are left out of the scheme, and 

 thereby gain two or three years ! start in the struggle for social 

 and economic success. This gives an advantage to the unfit 

 On the other hand, the benefits of service in the Army may be 

 great enough ultimately to compensate, and more than com- 

 pensate, for the loss of two or three years' work, so that the fit 

 will come out of the process with a greater advantage over the 

 unfit in the struggle for success than they originally possessed. 

 But that does not end the matter. There is a tendency, at least 

 in England, for social and economic success to be correlated with 

 a birthrate so greatly diminished that it more than counteracts 

 the low deathrate associated with a good environment, and hence 

 conscription might well have a slightly harmful racial effect on 

 account of the very fact that it is advantageous to the individual. 

 And there are other complications. I mention all these opposing 

 and uncertain factors in order to show how hopeless it is at 

 present to attempt to reach any reliable conclusion on the subject. 

 It has already been stated that the racial effects of war must 

 be theoretically inferred to be very different according as we 

 suppose the different theories of heredity to be true. But not 

 only will the effects under the Neo-Lamarckian and Mendelo- 

 Mutationist hypotheses be very different from the presumed 

 effects under the Neo-Darwinian theory, which is the theory 

 upon which the pessimists have usually based their argument, 

 but the applications of the Neo-Darwinian theory itself have not 

 been thought out with the ingenuity that one would have 

 expected. I should perhaps say that the Neo-Darwinian theory 

 is that which implies the possibility of producing a stable change 

 in the character of a population by the summation of minute 

 variations through the selection of individuals showing those 

 variations, but which excludes the transmission of acquired 

 characters. 2 Now a certain number, say about 75 to 80 per cent., 



1 Those who advocate national service for Great Britain usually propose only 

 six months' continuous training. 



8 Lest any reader should be unaware of the fact, I may mention that this is not 

 exactly Darwin's own view, for he himself believed in the transmission of acquired 

 characters as a subordinate factor in evolution. 



