260 



The Journal of Heredity 



it is a necessary source of national 

 energy ; that it is a source of racial well- 

 being, and that peace is inconsistent with 

 a good Hfe for men, is also fairly fa- 

 niihar. While it appears to be repug- 

 nant to most Americans, it contains 

 some real stuff. Professor Russell 

 gives a good statement of the case: 



"A great many of the impulses wlilch 

 now lead nations to go to war are in 

 themselves essential to any vigorous or 

 progressive life. Without imagination 

 and love of adventure a society soon 

 becomes stagnant and begins to decay. 

 Conflict, provided it is not destructive 

 and brutal, is necessary in order to stim- 

 ulate men's activities, and to secure the 

 victory of what is living over what is 

 dead or merely traditional. The wish 

 for the triumph of one's own cause, the 

 sense of solidarity with large bodies of 

 men, are not things which a wise man 

 will wish to destroy. It is only the out- 

 come in death and destruction and ha- 

 tred that is evil. The problem is to 

 keep these impulses, without making 

 war the outlet for them." 



1 low strong these dispositions are 

 can be known from the satisfaction 

 which ensues when they are properly 

 gratified — a satisfaction to which al- 

 most every soldier bears witness. "Men 

 say that the wonderful thing about the 

 terrible existence at the front is the 

 sense it gives them of being intensely 

 alive," writes a newspaper correspon- 

 dent who interviewed many poilits in 

 Paris. "Power, energy, endurance they 

 have never imagined comes into their 

 experience. They have a sense of vi- 

 tality, a keenness never felt in ordinary 

 life." And the experience of a charge 

 is graphically describerl in Tlic forum 

 by a former Knglish clerk as "by all 

 odds the finest feeling I ever had in my 

 life." 



"You can take it from me," he assures 

 his correspondent, "that the most highly 

 colored chromo-lithograph couldn't 

 overdo it. the es>cntial sj)irit of the 

 thing. Their detail is pretty groggy, of 

 course. .\o waving plumes, gay colors, 



"This point is well made by Graham Wallas in The Great Society, Chap, ix 

 York: The Macmillan Co.. 1914. 



•^It was first rlelivered as an address before a meeting of pacifists during the Spanish 

 American War. and is i)rintcd in a vnhime on his collected essays. 



flashing swords and polished top-boots. 

 My goodness, no ! We were all the 

 color of the foul clay we'd come from — 

 all over. But the spirit of it! It is 

 perfectly hopeless for me to try to tell 

 you, especially in a letter. They say 

 they pump spirits and drugs into the 

 r>oches before they leave their trenches. 

 Xo drug and no champagne, even of the 

 choicest, could have given us anv more 

 exhilaration than one felt in that dash 

 from the craters to the first Boche line. 

 Heavens, but it was the real thing! 

 Made one feel you'd never been really 

 and fully alive till then." 



EMOTION" REQUIRES OUTLET 



That is the sort of innate disposition 

 for war which the biological student 

 must face. Given that man has such 

 inherited impulses, what is he to do 

 with them? Any disposition that is 

 baulked, that fails to find expression, 

 sets up a nervous tension and leads to 

 a degenerate condition, if not to a neu- 

 rotic one.^ Man has the fighting dispo- 

 sition, and as a matter of mental hy- 

 giene he must do something to "get it 

 out of his system." What is he to do? 

 Sport and business offer a measure of 

 relief, as was pointed out above, but it 

 is evident that they fail to be wholly 

 satisfactory. The problem of .science 

 is to find a satisfactory substitute for 

 war; to furnish men with the combat 

 which their systems crave, but to make 

 this combat productive instead of de- 

 structive. No amount of appeal to the 

 reason or the emotions will abolish 

 war, but the provision of a proper sub- 

 stitute for war might help to do so. 



William James pointed this out clearly 

 in his famous essay" on "The Moral 

 Equivalent of War." and marked the 

 path along which those must proceed 

 who want to see the advantages of war- 

 fare retained and its highly dysgenic 

 features left out. lie suggested a uni- 

 versal conscription of youth, not for 

 military training, but for a light with 

 the environment in the old. prehistoric 

 way. in reclamation projects, for ex- 

 New 



