334 THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



Warfare as Natural History. 



From the advance pages of a book entitled "To-morrow's Topics" by Dr. Robert T. Morris, 



616 Madison Avenue, New York City, to appear from the press of 



Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, in May. 



HAT of the future? We 

 may judge from the past! 

 Tribes will destroy other 

 tribes. Nations will de- 

 stroy other nations. 

 Shortly after the sound of 

 the great 1914 explosion 

 was heard, a statistician reported that 

 fourteen different wars of more or less 

 interest to civilization were under way. 

 We pay little attention to conflicts 

 which do not interest us personally. 

 The world as a whole looks with pass- 

 ing thought upon impersonal wars in 

 Venezuela, Haiti, Tibet, Mexico, Al- 

 geria or Rhodesia. Could the sound of 

 all wars be brought within one hearing 

 distance, it would make a perennial 

 hum like the monotonous murmur of 

 a great wheel in the shop. 



All of this vibration belongs to the 

 shop of nature which is engaged in 

 turning out products of evolution. 

 The resultant of the parallelogram of 

 opposing forces carries winning 

 varieties of men to higher position in 

 the social scale. 



Frederick the Great calculated that 

 warfare by arms would recur about 

 once in five years. By this he pre- 

 sumably meant wars of special interest 

 to Europe. My own memory of con- 

 flicts extends back clearly for about 

 fifty years only, but during that time 

 we have seen our Civil War, the Ger- 

 man-Austrian, Franco-Prussian, Ser- 

 vo-Bulgarian, Turco-Russian, Spanish- 

 American. Anglo-Boer, Greco-Tur- 

 kish. Russo-Japanese, Italo-Tripolitan, 

 Balkan, and the present European war. 

 That would make the incidents rather 

 less than five years apart, and would 

 leave out of our calculations a much 

 larger number of lesser conflicts be- 

 longing to more distant countries. 



The doctrine of struggle belongs 

 then to the philosophy of one side of 

 the question. 



Opposed to the doctrine of struggle 

 in nature, we have the other doctrine, 

 that of dependence of one organic form 



upon another organic form. These 

 two doctrines represent forces which 

 are observed to be everywhere op- 

 posed to each other, in accordance 

 with the method of court procedure 

 under the codex of natural law 



Treitschke teaches that might is 

 right, and this idea carried to its log- 

 ical conclusion would result in there 

 being but one man left in the world, 

 and he with a wife who would require 

 to be killed in the interest of permanent 

 peace. 



Instead of the Treitschke idea, I 

 would inculcate the principle of mutual 

 dependence, when it comes to a ques- 

 tion of prognostication concerning 

 man's destiny. 



In the higher reaches of intellectual 

 work of man as moral agent, (if we 

 may employ that metaphysical expres- 

 sion) to-morrow's nations will engage 

 themselves largely with the mutual 

 dependence doctrine of Darwin. 



Taking a walk through Forty-Sec- 

 ond Street, from Fifth Avenue to the 

 Grand Central Station, and passing a 

 rather representative mixture of people, 

 one will be impressed perhaps by the 

 quantity rather than by the insignia of 

 moral agents who are in evidence. Yet, 

 if certain publications have recently de- 

 cided to deprive themselves of the in- 

 come from mendacious advertising, we 

 may fairly hope that the leaven of such 

 a spirit will eventually lead whole na- 

 tions to deprive themselves of the power 

 that results from profitable murder. 

 When the First Commandment has 

 been broken, the other Commandments 

 ravel loose pretty rapidly among the 

 people of a country, and some time 

 is required for gathering up the tangled 

 ends asrain. before the warp and woof 

 of civilization can be thrown evenly 

 for an attractive pattern. 



Nations come and go, breaking upon 

 the shores of Time like waves upon 

 Old Ocean's gravelly beach. In accord- 

 ance with the law of continuity ap- 

 plied to everything in nature, nations 



