158 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
the world. The imprudence of Bernhardi in forewarning Europe so openly 
of Germany's warlike intentions is not more astonishing than the un- 
concern displayed by our British statesmen. Although the influence of 
the civilian populations of the various countries engaged in this brutal 
war can avail but little in either stopping or mitigating its atrocities, it 
becomes the bounden duty of all to ponder seriously over the many object- 
lessons it has brought before us, because a considerable recasting of the 
international laws by which civilised nations have hitherto been governed 
has to be faced as soon as the abnormal fungus of Prussian militarism gets 
its coup cle grace. Our present code of international ethics is founded, 
not alone on experience of cosmic laws, but on deeply ingrained moral 
and altruistic sympathies of which mankind hold a monopoly. 
The phenomena and agencies of the organic world, on which Treitschke, 
Bernhardi, and others justify their brutal disregard of human life, belong 
to the domain of primeval savagery from which modern civilised people 
have sprung, and of which condition they still retain traces. But what 
has the modus vivendi of our lower antecedents to do with the ethics of 
present-day civilisation, which has been laboriously constructed by suc- 
cessive increments of social and moral improvements during the long ages 
which have rolled past since man started on his human career ? He has 
learned, however, that cosmic forces must be studied and obeyed by all 
mankind as well as by all other animals, because the more we know of 
their operations the greater our skill in controlling and utilising their 
results for the benefit of humanity. To trace moral laws to their primary 
rootlets, and to purge our beliefs of superstitions generated in days when 
scientific methods were too feeble to detect the errors on which they were 
founded, cannot but further the highest interests of human civilisation ; 
for we are reminded in a thousand ways that success in life depends on 
strict obedience to the forces on which the universe is governed. Bern- 
hardi, in founding his constantly reiterated statement that war is essential 
for the well-being of a nation on the principles of natural selection, forgets 
that both the methods of human civilisation and of German Kultur are 
at variance with the operations of the organic world. Modern civilisation 
is founded on the altruistic and moral inventions of mankind, and are 
directed not so much to the survival of the fittest as to the fitting of as 
many as possible to survive. Nature cuts off the weak, deformed, and 
stragglers in life’s battle: war selects its victims from the physically 
strong and healthy of the nation’s manhood, and leaves a feeble remnant 
to perpetuate the race. That racial degeneration is a consequence of social 
inactivity and an easily acquired supply of the necessaries of life is quite 
