74 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



chauvinists. But it is notorious that there are few things more 

 mischievous than a weak argument in favour of a good cause. 

 And as I am not advocating this particular argument against 

 war, I may perhaps say in passing that if any pacifist should 

 seek in this essay for the cloven hoof of militarism, he will not 

 find it. There may be reasonable difference of opinion about 

 the part which war has played in the past. It may perhaps 

 be legitimately contended that warfare was once a necessary 

 condition of human progress, although I think it would be 

 a mistake to subscribe offhand to that fatalistic doctrine. But 

 certainly nobody holds more strongly than the present writer 

 that war in modern Europe is a detestable enormity. The 

 biological effects of war are not the dominant consideration, 1 

 and even if war were definitely proved to be beneficial in the 

 eugenic sense, it need hardly be said that it would not be 

 thereby proved desirable. The case against those who apologise 

 for war as such (which is of course quite a different thesis from 

 supporting some particular war as a necessary evil), against the 

 Bernhardi school of writers, is so crushing that there is no call 

 to go in search of questionable pleas for arbitration. 



There are two methods of attacking the problem : (i) we may 

 go to history and see whether it affords us any proofs of a 

 connection between war and national degeneracy, and (2) we 

 may apply the laws of heredity to the known phenomena of war 

 and draw inferences regarding the effects which ought theoretic- 

 ally to follow from those phenomena. Both methods have been 

 adopted by the pessimists. I propose, however, to deal chiefly 

 with the theoretical side of the problem, since so far as the 

 direct historical evidence is concerned it appears impossible to 

 add much to the remarks already made by Sir Ronald Ross. 2 It 

 is worth mentioning, however, that in Europe, and over the 

 greater part of the world, wars have been in the past so 

 perpetual that if national degeneracy has occurred at all, it must 

 almost necessarily have followed these wars. We, whose first 

 impressions of international politics were gained in the peaceful 

 Victorian Era, are liable to forget how exceptional a prolonged 



1 It is right to say that Dr. Saleeby also emphasises the subordinate im- 

 portance of the whole discussion. Thus, although he thinks that the quality of 

 the British population will tend to deteriorate owing to the war, the cause of the 

 Triple Entente has no more enthusiastic supporter than he. 



8 Science Progress, January 1914. 



