216 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
among barbarous tribes and which were carried on by peoples of 
the cultural level of the Children of Israel and occasionally by 
those more advanced may have had a eugenic effect. Leading as 
they did to the supplanting of the conquered by their conquerors 
their general result must have been a gradual replacement of less 
efficient by more efficient peoples. But in modern warfare the 
vanquished are not exterminated. They are usually not dispos- 
sessed of their territory and after peace is declared they may 
multiply more rapidly than their conquerors. Our own Civil 
War certainly led to no desirable results from the viewpoint of 
group selection. Both sides lost much of their best blood, and it 
cannot be said that either side was the superior of the other in 
hereditary qualities. Between wars such as this and the en- 
counters of groups of primitive man there may be very varied 
kinds of biological effect depending on the varied methods of 
waging war, the character of the contestants and the nature of the 
final settlement of the conflict. Wars between the higher and 
lower races, such for instance as those which led to the replace- 
ment of the aborigines by the Anglo-Saxon are doubtless produc- 
tive of racial advance. The great extension of this enterprising 
people owes much to a series of successful wars against the less 
favored peoples who were found to be in the way. It cannot be 
denied that wars between subdivisions of the white race may have 
resulted in racial improvement, but it would be unsafe to claim 
this for most of them. Theoretically it is easy to justify war 
among modern peoples by saying that it is the best endowed 
group which is most apt to prevail, and therefore the best condi- 
tion for racial advancement is afforded by giving free play to 
group selection. This is the favorite standpoint of those who 
would justify war on biological grounds. As Steinmetz has 
pointed out in his able Philosophie des Krieges, modern wars, 
while they do not directly lead to extermination may leave a 
people so crippled, devoid of energy, spirit and enterprise that its 
life tends to stagnate and its population eventually decreases. 
Headley remarks in his Problems of Evolution ‘Though it can 
never happen that any of the European nations, even in the 
