IS WAR DYSGENIC 247 



then graduates with distinction, then masters of arts and science and the 

 holders of the doctorate, and finally the males from the continental United 

 States. 



To leave the statement of the case at this point, however, would not be 

 very convincing. The data for each group should be subdivided accord- 

 ing to age and this has been done in the chart which is before you. It can 

 be seen that the curves of the wall chart tell substantially the same story 

 as the table. These curves show some very interesting things. The medi- 

 cal men had very high enlistment rates, the holders of masters degrees 

 relatively low rates. Graduates without distinction, that is the poorer 

 students, enlisted more frequently than the better ones, while the lawyers 

 showed very erratic behavior, having a relatively high enlistment rate in the 

 lowest age group and a very low rate as compared with the other types for 

 the older men. Thus, within the Harvard contingent there was no consist- 

 ent relationship between frequency of enlistment and intellectual attain- 

 ment. The outstanding fact is that all of these types of Harvard men, who 

 are obviously the result of the fairly high selective process of our educational 

 system, showed higher rates of enlistment than the general run of American 

 males of comparable age. This was certainly a dysgenic tendency. Here 

 again we meet the phenomenon of the best going forth to battle with a 

 greater frequency than the mediocre and the inferior. 



Military mortalities, both among Harvard graduates and the male popu- 

 lation of the continental United States may be considered now. Death 

 rates, of course, are of more biological importance than enlistments, for a 

 man once dead will never return to rear a family. Several aspects of lethal 

 selection have been considered rather extensively in our monograph, but one 

 comparison must suffice here to bring out the essential relationship between 

 mortalities for the Harvard groups and for the males of the whole United 

 States. An accurate comparison is impossible because exact data concern- 

 ing comparable age groups cannot be obtained. Students seldom graduate 

 from college when younger than twenty-two years. The War Department 

 data on casualties are not classified by age groups, so that we must use the 

 death statistics for the United States army as of all ages from 15 to 49 years. 

 Furthermore, the male population in the continental United States for 1917 

 was determined not by a census count, but by an estimate based upon the 

 method of interpolation. The Harvard classes from 1891 to 1918, inclusive, 

 comprised men who ranged from about twenty-two to forty-nine years of 

 age at the opening of the World War. In the United States army, .96 ±.057 

 per cent of this Harvard population perished. What about corresponding 

 death rates for the male population for the continental United States as a 



