IS WAR DYSGENIC? 



H. R. HUNT 



Michigan Slate College 



The great World War has come and gone, but its consequences in the form 

 of economic and political chaos are with us still. About 10,000,000 men 

 gave their lives and over 20,000,000 others were injured during the conflict. 

 The net money cost of the war to all the belligerents was something over 

 $186,000,000,000. This figure does not cover the value of destroyed prop- 

 erty, the money value of dead soldiers and civilians, losses in production, 

 losses to neutrals, and expenditures for war relief work. Certainly, war is 

 a social and biological problem of the first magnitude. It must be intelli- 

 gently controlled if civilization is not to suffer severely. 



The war problem, however, has not been faced realistically. We in the 

 United States particularly are under the influence of two extreme groups of 

 sentimentalists, the flag-waving militarists on the one hand and the idealistic 

 pacifists on the other. Political and economic realism has been given scant 

 attention among us. Wherever there are human relations one of two condi- 

 tions obtains: there is either government or anarchy. Life, property, and 

 institutions are secure only when law and its agencies have replaced anarchy. 

 If we are to reduce the chance of holocausts like the World War, we must 

 unite in enterprises such as the League of Nations, the World Court, the 

 Kellogg pact, etc., so that all groups may be given the opportunity to bring 

 their disputes to court for settlement, so that all conceivable means for ad- 

 justing controveries peacefully may be developed, but we must at the same 

 time provide facilities for forcibly bringing a lawless group to the judicial 

 bench if it truculently persists in an effort to settle its grievance on the battle- 

 field. 



War, like bubonic plague and smallpox, is a social disease. We have 

 learned to control many of the great epidemic diseases because we now 

 understand them. Similarly, the road to the reduction of warfare will be 

 cleared by a study of its causes and consequences. The impact of the World 

 War experience turned my attention to this problem in 1922, and for seven 

 years I collected and analyzed data bearing upon the question, publishing 

 the results as a monograph of the Eugenics Research Association in 1930 

 under the title "Some Biological Aspects of War." The reader is referred to 



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