148 QUAKER ASPECTS OF TRUTH 



purposes ? The farmer who acted thus would soon 

 reap the harvest of his folly- And this is a true picture 

 of what is actually happening in Europe to-day. It 

 has happened in every military empire that has ever 

 existed- It happened in Assyria three thousand years 

 ago ; and when the best and bravest Assyrians were 

 killed off, the Assyrians were bred from the weak and 

 cowardly, and then Assyria fell, to be replaced by the 

 Empire of Babylon. Then the same thing happened 

 there and Babylon gave place to Persia and Persia to 

 Greece, and Greece to Rome ; in later times the same 

 thing happened to Spain and France. It has been 

 calculated that four million men were killed during the 

 Napoleonic Wars, and they the elite of Europe. More 

 than half of them were Frenchmen, and France was 

 re-peopled by men of shorter stature, poorer physique, 

 less courage, less intelligence and less virility. France 

 was thus impoverished, not only by those who were 

 slain, but by their children and their children's children, 

 who might have been, but were not. No military nation 

 has ever long survived. How could it ? War is race 

 suicide, because it reverses the law of the survival of 

 the fittest, and breeds from the least fit. 



I well remember, more than thirty years ago, 

 visiting the Valley of Aosta. At that time one could 

 not help but notice the great number of miserable, 

 cretinous imbeciles who inhabited that valley : men 

 and women, human in form, yet lacking all the dignity 

 of manhood, and even the inteUigence of the lower 

 animals. For centuries the intelligent peasantry of the 

 Valley of Aosta had been conscripted for the Austrian 

 Army. Only those who suffered from goitre were 

 allowed to follow the plough, and to repeople the Valley 

 with their children. The law of the survival of the 

 fittest was reversed, and the Valley was repeopled by the 

 least fit. And thus does war, like an awful ogre, tend to 



