THE SELECTIVE INFLUENCE OF WAR 217 
event of a great war ending in the complete victory of one side, 
will disappear in the sense that it will have no descendants, yet 
the number of its descendants depends very largely on wars and 
menaces of war. The country that secures the best of the earth 
will send out more colonists than the country that has to send its 
sons to live among foreigners and speak a strange language.” 
Results such as are here described have probably been produced 
in a few cases, but it is doubtful if many of the wars that have 
been waged in modern Europe have worked out in this way. So 
far as any racial effects are evident it is not improbable that most 
European wars have been injurious to all parties concerned. 
However defeat may have influenced national spirit it does not 
seem to have produced a very obvious effect on the birth rate. 
The successive defeats sustained by Austria in the 19th century 
have not hindered the rapid growth of her population. A victo- 
rious career does not affect so much the growth of a people as the 
expansion of a nation, which is generally a very different thing. 
National boundaries are of interest to the politician and 
historian, but to the student of racial biology they are mainly 
a source of confusion. Poland was obliterated as a nation, but, 
despite a considerable amount of mistreatment, the Poles have 
continued to multiply at a rate that has given their conquerors 
a certain amount of uneasiness. It is not to be inferred, however, 
that it is a matter of indifference from the biological standpoint 
whether people do or do not constitute a nation. Moreover in 
Europe at present the divisions of ethnic stocks are so crossed by 
national boundaries that strife between peoples would throw most 
countries into a many-sided civil war. 
The studies of the actual effects of war from the viewpoint 
of group selection is an almost untouched field. The difficulties 
in the way of adjudging the biological value of the wars that have 
occurred between civilized states are many and formidable. We 
know little of the differences in innate mental ability, as distin- 
guished from cultural development, that exist between the racial 
elements of civilized countries. There is reason to believe that 
the more conspicuous temperamental traits that distinguish the 
