482 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



drained, on the whole, neither the best nor the worst of the racial 

 stock, but has been an outlet for the intractable members of society. 

 Wild, ungovernable boys, hoodlums in the making, men with the blood- 

 lust still strong in them — such have joined the army and entered the 

 navy through the centuries. The great mercenary forces, recruited so 

 long throughout Europe, did not deprive civilization of men in whom 

 the social virtues were strongly marked. The professional military 

 class has always absorbed — and utilized to advantage, indeed — the men 

 tbat in the freedom of a purely commercial regime would have been 

 so much explosive material. 



This is not to deny, it is admitted, that war has often resulted in 

 retrogression through unfavorable selection. But the peace advocates 

 reveal the one-sidedness of their argument by a too frequent appeal to 

 examples of revolution and internal rebellion, like the French Kevolu- 

 tion and the Civil War in the United States, where members of the 

 superior and ruling classes were lopped off, or where enormous masses 

 of enthusiastic volunteers were enlisted from the citizenship. If war 

 had committed such ravages in the human stock as these pacificists 

 maintain, it might be supposed that there would have been a decline in 

 the fighting force of civilized men. But the very opposite is true. 

 Modern men are braver and steadier, make better soldiers, than did the 

 men of antiquity. 7 The reason is that the same moral qualities which 

 have been selected through the elimination of the anti-social, are, in 

 part, the virtues which make the best armies — such virtues as obedience, 

 the habit of discipline, self-control and steadfastness. And, curiously 

 enough, in the breeding out of the opposite qualities, the predatory dis- 

 position, irresponsibility and refractoriness, the unbroken existence of 

 the military organization has played its part. 



Another prominent factor in socialized selection comes under the 

 head of vice and racial poisons. No argument is required to prove that 

 persons who indulge in sexual excesses, in drunkenness, in drug habits, 

 in debauchery of any kind, are anti-social, lacking the moral stamina 

 which would make them, say, self-supporting individuals contributing 

 their share to the social income. Our point is that vice, in the degree 

 of indulgence, is also eliminative. Sexual excesses, for example, sap 

 energy, weaken resistance to disease, and predispose to early death. 

 The more licentious a man or woman, the greater are his or her chances 

 of contracting a venereal disease. Gonorrhea and syphilis, where they 

 do not kill, tend to sterilize. Consequently those who can not, through 

 lack of self-control or excessive lust, conform to social and ethical 

 standards of purity, cripple themselves in reproductive power. Prosti- 

 tutes, a big population in every country, every age, bear few, if any, 

 children. 



» ' < Physics and Politics, ' ' p. 47. 



