both the birth-rate and the death-rate, and thus inevitably to increase the proportion of old men in the ranks of the nation, with a consequent diminution in the percentage of the whole nation who are capable of fighting. In this respect civilization makes for military weakness; and here is an additional reason for urging that every attempt to promote civilization should be accompanied by reforms tending to ensure that all born into our nation in the future shall be of as good stock as possible.1

In reply to the foregoing arguments in favour of the view that war is highly dysgenic, it may be urged, in the first place, that modern war only selects its victims with reference to their physical qualities, and that the nobler mental qualities of the nation remain uninjured. The available evidence, however, tends to prove that good physical qualities are correlated that is to say as a rule in some degree associated with good and not with bad mental qualities; and, consequently, even if it were true that the selection of men for slaughter in war depended entirely on their bodily fitness, yet that slaughter would have some tendency to eliminate such racial stocks as are superior from a mental point of view. It must be remembered, however, that many valuable mental qualities render a man more likely to be selected as an officer or non-commissioned officer, both of which classes had in the late war a higher death-rate than the rank and file-more than twice as high, I believe, amongst the junior officers. War certainly now damages both the mental and physical qualities of a race.

Then, again, it may be suggested that as those killed in modern warfare form but a small percentage of any nation, and as the women and children always remain as an untouched store of fine material, the racial effects will not in the end be very serious. It is true that France, which suffered in the Great War more than any other nation, only lost by death 3.5 per cent. of its total population. This figure, however, should never be quoted without reference to many qualifying considerations. For instance, as a point nearly always overlooked, the 1 Prof. R. Pearl, Scientific Monthly, September 1921, p. 212.

death of a number of men renders childless a nearly equal number of women; and if mating were perfectly assortive -instead of only being nearly so the average quality of the women rendered childless would be the same as the average quality of the men who were killed. It would, therefore, be more to the point to note that France lost over 7 per cent. of its total male population. No doubt, what we should like to know is the extent to which those killed would have transmitted their qualities to their descendants if they had been spared, this being dependent on the number of children they would have had subsequently. If a man had had half his destined family before the war, his loss would be equivalent to the loss of only half a man from the racial point of view, that is when considering the size of the store from which the good qualities of the nation could be replenished; but as those killed were for the most part in the prime of life, but little deduction from our estimate of the damage done should be made on this account. From this same point of view, the men, whether fighters or not, who are destined to have no more offspring should not be counted at all when enumerating the racial reserve of a nation, whilst the same is true of all those children who are destined to die before becoming parents. Lastly, there is some loss of fertility on the part of the wounded, which should also be taken into account. I cannot, therefore, even hazard a guess as to the amount by which the figure 7 should be increased before it could be fairly quoted as an indication of the percentage of loss in the Great War of what may be described as the parental power of the French nation; whilst to speak of 35 per cent. in this connexion is certainly nothing less than grossly deceptive.

The immediate effects of war are so patent and so grievous that it hardly seems necessary to strengthen the case in favour of peace by bringing forward any arguments based on racial considerations. It may, therefore, be sufficient to conclude by saying that the broad conclusion at which we have arrived is that a nation, by keeping out of war, instead of destroying the virility of its people, as is popularly supposed, would be doing its best to preserve

all those qualities which are helpful in war. Peace is, moreover, the time to accumulate wealth, one of the main sinews of war; in peace the best opportunities are afforded for making enduring alliances; and it will be such peaceful nations as strive to maintain the inborn qualities of their people at a high level by well-considered eugenic reforms which will be most likely to come out triumphant if forced into wars against their will.

CHAPTER XXVII

EUGENICS AND THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE

SCIENCE DOES NOT ADMIT THE EXISTENCE OF PURPOSIVE AGENCIES

EUGENICS has frequently been attacked on religious grounds, and these attacks cannot be ignored. In searching for any means of reconciling the opposing parties in this conflict of opinions it is of comparatively little use merely to look to the records of their verbal contests; for what we have to discover is the true underlying causes of the trouble. These are as a rule to be found in the belief held by the religious opponents of eugenics that the character of man, in so far as it depends on his will power, cannot be in any way affected by scientific methods. No doubt most students of science do hold that all experience goes to prove that all the differences between the actions of men are associated with certain differences in their physical conditions, internal or external; because actions not associated with any conceivable physical conditions must for ever be without any basis on which relevant scientific considerations could be founded, and no scientific forecast could conceivably be made concerning them. Actions which may be described as being the result of free will cannot, as we shall see, be predicted; and the existence of free will in the sense in which these words are here used cannot be admitted by science, so it is often urged. Here we touch on a controversy which has lasted for centuries, which has filled hundreds of volumes and which has engaged the attention of the most brilliant intellects the world has ever known. To touch on it with the brevity which is here necessary seems absurd; and yet the issues are so fundamental

that I feel that they cannot be ignored by the eugenist. It is, however, only possible for me to approach these questions from the point of view of the student of social reform and unfortunately not from that of the trained philosopher.

Certainly it cannot be denied that science is constantly finding new laws by means of which previously unconnected groups of facts can be linked together, and that in this way our powers of foretelling the future on the basis of existing conditions are continually being increased. The student of science is thus led on to believe that if he were perfectly wise and perfectly well informed-an impossible ideal, he knows only too well-the future of the world would be laid open before him to be read like a book. Even if he does not go so far as this, he assumes that like previous conditions will always be followed by like subsequent events; for he sees that it is only on this assumption that rational action based on forethought becomes a possibility. If past experiences could not be accepted as a reliable guide, then advances in human affairs would have to be made in complete darkness. And his scientific studies give the student no reason for excluding human affairs from the scope of his conclusions; which tell him that it is only the great complexity of biological questions which often make it more difficult to look into the future in regard to human welfare than in regard to mere physical events. He holds that the actions of men are completely governed by their innate tendencies and their surroundings, and that their proceedings are as subject to fixed laws as are the movements of inanimate bodies. Every scientific generalization, as it is discovered, tends to confirm these views as to the possibility of predicting events connected with human beings. For example, all statistical inquiries, whether concerning births, deaths, marriages or burglaries, have shown with what extraordinary accuracy the actions of human beings in the mass can be foretold on the basis of existing facts and ascertained laws. In short his own investigations tend to make the student of science look on human beings as automatons, or as puppets pulled by