GENETIC EFFECTS OF WAR IN HUNGARY 251 



2. If during the War the more talented, healthier and stronger individuals, 

 who were more necessary to the nation, had been exempted from war-service 

 and protected from the effects of the War in the interests of the pacific work 

 of the homeland or of science, it would have exercised a political influence 

 on the composition of the population. It is a pity that the motives for these 

 exemptions were rather the need of filling the positions actually filled and 

 that the persons holding them could not be replaced, without regard to the 

 state of health of the individuals or their genetic capacities. We regret to 

 say that no eugenic effect of preserving the Hungarian race resulted from 

 such exemptions though the idea was plausible as the Hungarian civil service 

 is filled mostly by Magyars, of Magyar nationality and race, and for this 

 reason these also would have been exempt. The Magyars however, burning 

 with patriotic zeal, joined up voluntarily for the War, if need be to shed their 

 blood for their country. The classification of the wounded and slain accord- 

 ing to religion shows that in the World War the members of the Reformed 

 Church — the so-called "Hungarian Religion" — headed the list of slain. It 

 was not the thoroughbred Magyars but chiefly the Jews who avoided the 

 War by means of exemptions obtained under the most various pretexts. 

 The statistics, of Mike 4 also testify to this fact. 



3. The war-time reduction of the proportion and number of intermarriages 

 is also a eugenic effect, since from consanguineous marriages — as I set forth 

 in detail in my lecture delivered in Rome in 1931 at the International 

 Congress of Demography 5 — individuals are more frequently born suffering 

 from defective development, particularly congenital deafness or albinism, 

 than from other marriages. In Hungary the number of consanguineous 

 marriages, with ecclesiastical dispensation, fell in 1916 during the War to 

 215 in comparison with the 911 of 1913, i.e. from 0.53 to 0.35 per cent. The 

 mobilised men travelled all over the country, were trained for military serv- 

 ice in quite different towns from those in which they lived, while the 

 wounded were distributed throughout the provincial hospitals. Thus the 

 population of the country mixed together more freely during the War than 

 they had done in peace. Consequently relations were often separated by 

 distance from each other and young people contemplating matrimony were 

 thrown into the society of strangers more frequently than in normal times. 

 By this means the probability of the meeting of "gens" burdened with reces- 

 sive pathological inclinations was reduced. 



4. If may be mentioned that the Great War caused the re-awakening of 



4 Vide the treatise of G. Mike in the "Hungarian Statistical Review." Year 1927, 

 No. 7, page 623. 



5 Vide "Les Ejjels Disgeniques de la Consanguinile," by T. Szel. Rome, 1931. 



