4 WAR & STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 



is ruled by an unceasing struggle for existence, by 

 the right of the stronger, and that this struggle in 

 its apparent cruelty brings about a selection elimi- 

 nating the weak and the unwholesome." The 

 existing disposition of the animal kingdom has come 

 about by a process of evolution and descent. There 

 is one critical and recurring phase in the drama of 

 evolution. Some zoological unit, a family, race, 

 variety or species, may have been struggling on 

 tolerably equal terms for countless generations, now 

 securing, now losing a little advantage, when the 

 maturing of an innate or acquired quality, or a 

 turn in the kaleidoscope of the world, upsets the 

 equilibrium. The favoured unit increases in num- 

 bers, overruns its old limits, and comes into fierce 

 competition with its neighbours. It has now to 

 justify its innate or acquired advantage, to make 

 good its new place in the sun, and there is only one 

 mode in which this may be accomplished. In von 

 Bernhardi's words, " The natural law to which all 

 the laws of nature can be reduced, is the law of 

 struggle." " From the first beginning of life war has 

 been the basis of all healthy development. Struggle 

 is not merely the destructive, but the hfe-giving 

 principle. The law of the stronger holds good 

 everywhere. Those forms survive which are able 

 to secure for themselves the most favourable condi- 

 tions of hfe. The weaker succumb." I need not 

 multiply quotations that are now famihar. The 

 doctrine, in short, is that organisms rise to higher 

 things not on the stepping-stones of their dead selves, 

 but on the dead bodies of all that come in their way. 

 The German nation is a biological unit at this 



