144 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



from wars of annihilation to rivalries in things of the spirit. 

 The degrees of intensity of selection among the mores corre- 

 spond to the degrees of violence and decisiveness in this com- 

 petition. 



The ultimate form of societal selection one from which 

 there is no appeal is the war of annihilation. It was the 

 tribunal before which all the earliest and most important 

 collisions in societal policy were settled. War is still the court 

 of last appeal when all milder forms of settlement have, as in 

 the year 1914, failed. It is not supposed to involve annihila- 

 tion nowadays, though, as the popular fancy noted, the treat- 

 ment accorded Belgium and northern France savored of Attila 

 the Hun. 



Of course the mores do not fight each other, though we say, 

 figuratively, that Protestantism fought Catholicism, or that 

 there is a warfare between religion and science. It is not the 

 codes of mores that fight; it is the men practicing the codes 

 who do that. But the codes rise and fall with the successes of 

 their sponsors in the competition. If a tribe that practices 

 cannibalism comes into collision with another which abhors 

 the custom, and is overcome, there is not likely to be much 

 anthropophagy in that region for some time. For even if 

 the conquered cannibals are not massacred, but enslaved, they 

 lose, along with their power, their self-determination in the 

 matter of their code. I think it will be clear, upon reflection, 

 that great wars generally issue in so-called "new eras," "new 

 worlds," or "new dispensations," which mean new codes of 

 adjustment. 



In the course of time the minor collisions of codes have 

 come to be settled without much or any bloodshed. Enlight- 

 ened states refuse to concern themselves much about the reli- 

 gious beliefs of their constituent groups, where once execution 

 and persecution were rife. Revolutions have been tamed down 

 into elections. Commercial and industrial warfare is carried 



