76 PRODUCTION OF NATIONALITY 



such loss as " the longest price of war," and Pro- 

 fessor J. Arthur Thomson, in a recent Galton Lecture 

 [Nature Vol. 94, p., 686), referred, rather more 

 doubtfully, to modern war as being " on the whole 

 dysgenic." But even on the physical side, the evi- 

 dence is vague and conflicting. The relatively low 

 stature in France, which has been adduced as a 

 consequence of the Napoleonic campaigns, is without 

 doubt racial, and it is still lower in the southern half 

 of Italy, which was very slightly affected by the 

 great wars of the First Empire. No certain infer- 

 ences can be drawn from the evidence of the actual 

 results of the Franco-German War. In the year of 

 the war there were 75,000 fewer marriages than usual 

 in France. In 1871, on the conclusion of the war, 

 an unprecedented number of marriages took place. 

 Professor W. Z. Ripley [The Races of Europe, p. 88) 

 has summed up what is known as to the physical 

 effects on the population as follows : " Two ten- 

 dencies have been noted, from a comparison of the 

 generations of offspring severally conceived before, 

 during, and after the war. This appeared in the 

 conscripts who came before the recruiting commis- 

 sions in 1890-92, at which time the children conceived 

 in war-times, became, at the age of twenty, liable 

 for service. In the population during the progress 

 of the war, the flower of French manhood, then in 

 the field, was without proportionate representation. 

 There must have been an undue preponderance not 

 only of stunted men rejected from the army for 

 deficiency of stature alone but of those otherwise 

 physically unfitted for service. Hence the popula- 

 tion born at this time ought, if heredity means any- 



