98 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



and thus the actual extinction of living matter be 

 increasingly avoided. For instance, we find the 

 substitution of judicial procedure, in which the ideas 

 of two disputants about the matter in dispute are 

 weighed and a selection made in favour of one, for 

 various forms of violence and combat in which one 

 or other of the actual disputants was often eliminated. 

 Or again, in struggles between communities, even 

 though warfare is still resorted to, yet it does not 

 operate in the same way as in earlier stages of 

 human evolution. A salient example of this is 

 afforded by the result of the recent war to Germany ; 

 although an equally good instance can be seen, for 

 example, in the Boer War. In primitive wars, the 

 defeated tribe was wherever possible exterminated or 

 enslaved : it ceased to exist as an independent unit, 

 and the great majority of its male members were 

 killed. This is impossible under present conditions : 

 and all those who preserve, or have ever possessed, 

 any political sanity aim, for instance, neither at the 

 physical nor the economic destruction or subordina- 

 tion of Germany, but — to use one of those attractive 

 catchwords that sounded so well in war-time — 

 at her ' change of heart ' — in other words, the 

 extermination, not of a nation, but of a national 

 tradition. 



To what extent this substitution of mental for 

 physical will continue it is hard to say ; already, to 

 take another field, the multiplication of cheap books 



