232 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ANIMALS 



war is necessary to maintain racial vigor. This is a 

 matter on which statistics are not available, and on 

 which personal opinion must play as reasonable a 

 part as it can. 



To me it seems a misreading of history that leads 

 to the justification of war as a means of keeping up 

 the vigor of the race. I should say, rather, that wars 

 have frequently revealed the loss of racial or national 

 vigor among a people made soft by easy living, which 

 in turn had been made possible, at least at times, by 

 a long series of successful wars of conquest. 



Anyone who attempts to maintain the thesis that 

 wars do keep racial stocks vigorous— and there are 

 biologists who believe this— is troubled by the Chinese 

 people. This much-discussed and frequently invaded 

 land was populated by the forerunners of the pres- 

 ent Chinese during the days when Egypt, Assyria, 

 Babylon, Greece and Persia, to name no more, were 

 fighting the wars recorded in our general histories. 

 Those warlike peoples have lost their racial vigor 

 but the Chinese, who have been relatively peaceful, 

 have retained it. This stumbling block cannot be 

 removed by denying racial vigor to the Chinese; they 

 have, in the past, absorbed too many temporary con- 

 querors, and have occupied and are occupying by 

 peaceful penetration too much of the earth's terri- 

 tory, to be dismissed as a racially decadent people. 



