I3I4 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



(2) This is accentuated by the weU-known facts that specially 

 brave bodies of men are selected for very hazardous tasks in which 

 the mortality is often great, and that particularly brave men run 

 unusually great risks. The Victoria Cross has been repeatedly 

 awarded to some hero who lost his life in the exploit which won him 

 the distinction. It is true that the fortuitous bulks largely in the 

 casualties of modern warfare, and that there is often no sifting at 

 all, but simply a tragic indiscriminate elimination, as when a battle- 

 ship goes down. But where sifting does occur, it tends to be in the 

 wrong direction, cutting off the very best. (3) There is another way 

 in which war works in the wrong direction, by making life dispro- 

 portionately difficult (and marriage often impossible) for the mem- 

 bers of the race who are least readily replaceable. It is necessary to 

 hold by the ideal of the state as a body politic — an organism — in 

 which all wholesome men and women have their place and function; 

 but it is plain enough that artists and discoverers, poets, and 

 reformers are more precious than mediocrities. Indeed, the eye 

 cannot say unto the hand "I have no need of thee", nor again the 

 head to the foot, "I have no need of you"; but we are not equally 

 irreplaceable ! In the retrenchments that must follow a great war 

 in which hundreds of millions of pounds are spent unproductively, 

 the tendency is to economise most on super-necessaries, and un- 

 luckity on the finer super-necessaries, such as books, music, pictures, 

 and higher education. This must tend to handicap most severely the 

 more highly individuated members of the community. The highly 

 skilled, whose work seems to be most readily dispensed with, will be 

 pinched most; and they are certainly part of the salt of the earth. 



WAR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE.— It is a common 

 belief that the evolution of living creatures has been due to the 

 struggle for existence, and it is a common doctrine that what has 

 worked so well among plants and animals should be allowed to 

 operate in mankind. In making war, it is said, we are following 

 Nature. As Bernhardi says, the decisions of war "rest on the very 

 nature of things. . . . The law of the stronger holds good every- 

 where". This view reeks with misunderstandings which must be 

 pointed out. {a) To begin with, biologists are agreed that the essen- 

 tial fact in evolution is the occurrence of variations or novelties. 

 They furnish the raw materials of evolution and they are obviously 

 indispensable. If they are to count they must be entailed or trans- 

 mitted — ^heredity being one of the conditions of evolution. If they 

 are to be more than beginnings they must stand the criticism of the 

 conditions of life in which they have emerged — Natural Selection 

 or Natural Elimination, which occurs in the course of the Struggle 

 for Existence, being another of the conditions of evolution. Natural 

 Selection prunes off the relatively unfit new departures, but the 



