150 The Special Sociological Errors 



not as a result of the Reign of Terror that the 

 constitutionalists in France established the Rights 

 of Man. In so far as violence was employed, an 

 epoch of reaction, instead of the hoped-for new era, 

 was inaugurated; whereas in so far as the French 

 Revolution was successful, it was an intellectual 

 revolution resulting from the spread of the ideas 

 of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the other great French 

 philosophers of the eighteenth century. 



In order to study the realities, let us consider 

 the two cases which may result from war. Either 

 a territorial conquest is made, as in the case of 

 the War of 1870, when Germany annexed Alsace- 

 Lorraine, or no territorial annexation takes place, 

 as in the War of 1866, when Prussia did not annex 

 any part of the Austrian territory. Collective 

 selection might be a reality in the first case, if the 

 conquering state, having superior institutions, 

 introduced them immediately into the new posses- 

 sions. But this is far from being always the case. 

 The victorious state very often has institutions not 

 only inferior to those enjoyed by the conquered 

 territory before the war, but the institutions 

 introduced into the conquered territory may be 

 inferior to those established in the remainder of 

 the victorious state, as illustrated by the military 

 government of Alsace-Lorraine, symbolized by 

 the Zabem incident, or the Russian government 

 of Finland or Poland. Where does the pretended 

 positive selection take place in such a case? It 

 might be said, on the contrary, that if war consti- 



