140 The Special Sociological Errors 



The favourite argument of "social Darwinism" 

 is familiar to almost everyone. War has been 

 the cause of civilization, because it has constituted 

 a process of selection in the human species. The 

 strongest, and therefore the best, have survived 

 in the battle, while the weak and the inferior have 

 been killed off, and thus the race has been perfected. 



This infantile theory has been so thoroughly 

 exploded by eminent biologists like David Stan- 

 Jordan,^ who have examined the actual facts of 

 the effects of war on the race, that it is imnecessary 

 to lose time in slaying the slain here. War pro- 

 duces a selection, of course, but it is a reverse 

 selection. The actual facts of the process of 

 selection by which militarism improves the race 

 may be sketched as follows: Carefully select the 

 flower of the race from each country ; reject all but 

 the very finest of the young men, those who are 

 perfect in mind and body, and line these up by 

 the millions against machine-guns and automatic 

 rifles, mow them down by the thousands with 

 shrapnel and high explosive shells, coming from 

 unseen artillery miles away, tmtil the casualty 

 lists run up into the millions, — and leave behind 

 the product of the slums, the undersized, the 

 physically and mentally imperfect, the infirm and 

 the weak, to be fathers of the next generation. 



' See The Blood of the Nations, The Human Harvest (a study 

 of the decay of races through the survival of the unfit), War and 

 the Breed, and War's Aftermath (a study of the eflfects of the 

 American Civil War and of the Balkan Wars upon the race). 



