MILITARISM 537 



and more guarded treatment than they usually obtain, there 

 is no gainsaying that there are grim facts behind them ; and 

 without trying to make a scapegoat of militarism, it is difficult 

 to silence the thought that just as Napoleon reduced the physical 

 stature of the French nation, just as the wars of the Roman 

 Empire rooted out the best and left Rome to a mob who made 

 gods in their own image, so we are -now paying the biological 

 bill for past wars. Apart from the multiplication of " the 

 social precipitate " inter se, is there not a persistent deposit of 

 more precipitate from above, and may not the deterioration, 

 which the military examinations, for instance, reveal, be in great 

 part due to the crushing burden of militarism itself ? The 

 suggested surgical methods to eliminate the " precipitate " 

 from reproduction — if not from more — may be a little away from 

 the point if the persisting social conditions are meanwhile 

 securing a continuous deposit of more " precipitate." 



If all the best heads in a deer-forest — such a dramatic illustra- 

 tion of reversed selection (" ob-selection ") in many ways — are 

 persistently shot down, the race of deer cannot keep up to the 

 desired standard ; if through militarism, and the spirit behind 

 it, a human breed is being left for the greater part of its con- 

 tinuance to the less fit, it will not be surprising if history repeats 

 itself, and " Vir " is replaced by a mere " Homo." When we 

 contemplate any national decadence — that of the Roman 

 Empire is at a convenient distance — we may interpret the facts 

 biologically, as an American zoologist, Professor D. S. Jordan,* 

 has recently done, in terms of the reversed selection which 

 spoiled the human harvest, or psychologically, in terms of the 

 changed ideas and ideals of the average man, or sociologically, 

 in terms of variations in the organisation of the societary form ; 

 but, fundamentally, these interpretations must be capable of 

 a unification, and this it is particularly the task of the sociologist 



* See " The Human Harvest " (American Philosophical Society, 

 April 1906; also separately, Boston, 1907, pp. 122). 



