72 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



it may be indefensible, but its main justification 

 is that it is successful. Should prisoners of war 

 be put to death ? It is always ugly, but it is 

 sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin, 

 or corrupt a citizen, or incite an incendiary ? 

 Certainly : it may not be reputable and honour may 

 fight shy of it, but the law of war is less touchy. 

 Should the women and children, the old and the 

 feeble, be allowed to depart before a bombard- 

 ment begins ? On the contrary : their presence 

 is greatly to be desired ; it makes the bombard- 

 ment all the more effective." l 



In England all the first attempts to apply the 

 Darwinian conceptions to society were carried along 

 well-marked lines. In the early stages Huxley, 

 Tyndall, Grant Allen, and a crowd of popular writers 

 give currency in England to the applications of 

 Darwinism which Haeckel was voicing in Germany 

 and Renan in France. But the embodiment of the 

 Darwinian theories in the policy of the State did 

 not take place in Great Britain. The movement 

 as a whole reached in England its high-water mark 

 in phases of wider extravagance but all of which 

 preserved their own peculiar characteristics. 



1 The German War Book : being " The Usages of War on 

 Land," issued by the great General Staff of the German Army. 

 Translated by J. H. Morgan, M.A., Professor of Constitutional 

 Law, University College, London, p. 2. 



