THE SELECTIVE INFLUENCE OF WAR 215 



cooperation. We need only to compare the behavior of ants, 

 termites, and the social bees and wasps with the activities of the 

 unsocial relatives of these insects to be impressed with this fact. 

 Man cannot be compared with these insects in regard to the ex- 

 tent to which the purely social instincts have been developed; he 

 is still very much of a self-centered, individualistic sort of crea- 

 ture. How many ages of bloody conflict it has taken to endow hu- 

 man beings with their present rather imperfect adaptation to so- 

 cial life we can only estimate in a very approximate way. The 

 teachings of history, the observations of the present customs of 

 primitive races and what little information can be gleaned of the 

 civilization of early human inhabitants of the earth indicate that 

 human beings have evolved under the stress of keen competition, 

 not only with the forces of nature, but at more or less frequent 

 intervals with other members of their own species. As Huxley 

 has remarked, "However imperfect the reHcs of prehistoric man 

 may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the 

 conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the 

 origin of the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a 

 very low type. They strove with their enemies and their competi- 

 tors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than them- 

 selves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for 

 thousands of generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the 

 lion, and the hyaena, whose Hves were spent in the same way; 

 and they were no more to be praised or blamed, on moral grounds, 

 than their less erect and more hairy compatriots." 



If warfare had been dysgenic in its effects durmg the early 

 periods of human development we may well wonder how the race 

 should ever have arrived at its present high estate. But as 

 civilization advances, and as human beings become organized 

 into larger and larger social groups the character of warfare 

 gradually changes. With the development of armies which carry 

 on their operations often at a distance from the civilian popula- 

 tion, and especially since the perfection of fire arms, the advan- 

 tages in favor of the strongest and most skillful warrior were 

 decreased. Wars of extermination which arc not uncommon 



