Proenvironment in the Evolution of Man 637 



energy, that together tend to carry the human organism to 

 ulthnate success. And in any community or nation where 

 "struggle for existence" is allowed fullest scope, "natural 

 selection" then steps in to ensure survival of each such suc- 

 cessful one. For under such a merciless law — fortunately 

 not the only or highest law of organic life and survival — the 

 less inventive, the poorer, the feebler, the less far-seeing suc- 

 cumb in "the race for life." 



But mention of these last problems again brings forward 

 for consideration that problem already discussed partially 

 in Chapter XIX, namely social or cooperative action. We can 

 now examine some phases of it, in order to ascertain how it 

 might work out for man. 



Amongst primitive nations of the past, or even amongst 

 present-day ones, let us suppose that two of these inhabited 

 adjacent land areas, and were struggling keenly for territory, 

 and all that such means. Let us suppose further that both 

 had at a certain time an equal number of inhabitants, but 

 that one of them by hard vigorous individualistic laws allowed 

 the less successful — the weaker, poorer, less alert by slight 

 degree — to perish, while the other by ameliorated social laws 

 kept the less successful alive, and even encouraged a feeling 

 of kind loyalty, of sympathetic helpfulness, of friendly coop- 

 eration on the part of the less with the more successful. If 

 now, in a close-drawn and sanguinary war, the former could 

 muster and rely on the loyalty only of its "successful" ones 

 who had pulled through in the national struggle for existence, 

 while the other could muster equally its successful and its 

 less successful though by no means discouraged or useless 

 ones, who also were encouraged by a kind and sympathetic 

 feeling toward the more successful, the victory would almost 

 certainly rest with "the big battalions." For the latter was 

 big in the double sense of numbers and of enthusiastic unity 

 in a common cause. 



Exactly such a biological condition prevailed during the 

 war between Japan and Russia. The former country had a 

 recent and comparatively unshapen history; it had derived 



