320 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



the biologically fit. Here we come at once to a most serious 

 result of modern militarism ; it must produce, in the long run, 

 a regression of the biological average of the entire race. 



But this is only the negative side of this inverse selection. 

 The positive side is manifested as the result of the operations 

 of war. As we have said, the biologically fit alone are selected 

 for military service ; therefore it is they alone who are decimated 

 by war. It has been calculated that the wars of the French 

 Eevolution of 1789-95 cost the lives of 1,800,000 Frenchmen 

 and of 2,500,000 foreigners. The wars of the Empire were more 

 costly still ; it is calculated that they were responsible for the 

 destruction of 2,600,000 Frenchmen and 3,500,000 Europeans of 

 other extraction, thus reaching a total of over 7,000,000. Add 

 to this number that of the victims of the Revolutionary wars, 

 and we get an approximate total of 11,500,000 of slain in less 

 than twenty years, exclusive of those countless indirect victims 

 of every war who perish from war's attendant miseries. It has 

 been calculated that the Crimean War cost upwards of 750,000 

 lives ; the American War of Secession, 330,000 ; the Prusso- 

 Austrian War of 1866, 150,000 ; and the Franco-German War of 

 1870, 215,000. According to statistics furnished by M. de 

 Lapouge, Europe and America have lost, through war, no fewer 

 than 9,450,000 lives since 1815 ; if we add this number to that 

 of the 11,500,000 victims of the wars of the Revolution and 

 Empire, we get a total of nearly 21,000,000 lives lost in this 

 manner in a little more than a century for civilised nations alone.^ 

 If we could say that these 21,000,000 lives represent the bio- 

 logically unfit and degenerate portion of humanity, there would 

 be every reason to congratulate ourselves on this elimination of 

 the waste matter of the community ; in that case we could truly 

 say that war was a beneficial institution in our modern civilisa- 

 tion, an indispensable instrument of selection. But, as we have 

 said, these 21,000,000 lives unfortunately represent the bio- 

 ^ G. de Lapouge, Lis Selections societies, p. 222. Paris, 1896. 



