NOTES 5i5 



appalling phenomenon ? According to Darwin the result was 

 beneficial because it led to the elimination of the less effective. 

 War differed from other selective agencies in that it might wipe 

 out an entire race ; and the intellectual and moral gap between 

 man and the next highest creatures was possibly as great as it 

 was by reason of man's warlike nature. Tribal evolution under 

 the moulding of war would suffice to explain the development 

 of such virtues as self-sacrifice, courage, constancy, obedience, 

 and the honourable keeping of compacts in spite of self-interest. 

 Such qualities would be mere foolishness to a Martian evolved 

 in a warless environment. But we, when we blamed a man for 

 being selfish, or a coward, or dishonourable, really accused him 

 of being dysgenic — of not possessing the qualities which millions 

 of years of tribal evolution should have given him. He is 

 imperfect, like a lunatic or a deformed person. It happens that 

 the warlike virtues are the social virtues, and so they affect 

 social evolution enormously. In their entirety they are covered 

 by the word " duty," and of duty sprang religion. From the 

 warlike virtues too sprang much of poetry and music. The 

 purely intellectual qualities of cunning, observation, accurate 

 reasoning, the faculty of inventing tools, and of seizing oppor- 

 tunities are too obviously associated with the warlike spirit to 

 need much emphasis. 



Sir Ronald proceeded to quote some arguments which had 

 been directed against the view outlined. Darwin himself had 

 pointed out that the best and finest young men were exposed to 

 early death during war, while shorter and feebler men were left 

 at home to propagate their kind. The Chancellor of Stamford 

 University had stated that war was utterly dysgenic. But the 

 speaker pointed out that the facts were all against the theory. 

 The warlike nations were the nations of splendid manhood. He 

 instanced the Zulus and Masai, the Sikhs and Pathans— and 

 referred to the miserable physique of the unwarlike tribes. He 

 thought that modern warfare was perhaps more dysgenic than 

 the ancient, because warfare by missiles was less discriminating 

 than hand-to-hand combat. At the same time success in modern 

 war depended not so much on single military virtues] as on the 

 total complex, resulting in national efficiency. 



He did not think that a true logical conclusion of this argu- 

 ment was that war was a thing to be eternally encouraged. It 

 appeared to him that the function of war as an evolutionary 



