concerning himself with this matter, would attempt to find out whether this selective propagation within the English people is tending to the advantage or disadvantage of the race; and if to its disadvantage, he would attempt to remedy it by publicity, education, and any other means under social control. Similarly, any other condition of present human living that seems to have direct relation to human breeding is legitimate subject of the eugenist's scrutiny. Any institution of human life that seems to have direct relation, whether of advantage or disadvantage, to the modification of the race by determining in any way the character of race propagation, invites his attention. Such a human institution, of great age, great development, and great prestige, is war.

II

Stress is put in most writings against war on the imposing figures of the actual human mortality due to it. To attempt to estimate the millions of men who were lost in the Napoleonic wars is to bring one, first, to a shuddering realization of the horror of it all, and, next, to a serious thoughtfulness concerning the possible racial injury worked on the decimated peoples. And this thoughtfulness becomes more serious when one learns that one third of all the lost men came from a single nation, whose total population at the beginning of the wars was but twentyfive millions.

But great mortality in itself is not necessarily a great racial catastrophe. Indeed, it is, in the face of the geometrical progression by which reproduction moves, one of the veritable conditions of advance in animal life. Throughout the kingdom of life, plant as well as animal, the overproduction of individuals and their reduction by death to a fractional part of the orig

inal number is one of the basic conditions of progress, if Darwinism is a sound explanation of organic evolution. For this death will be in the nature of things selective, and hence will make for the modification of the species toward a condition of better adaptation to conditions of life. Indeed, the upholders of war have used precisely the argument of war's high mortality as a proof of war's real beneficence to the race. Ammon, for example, consistently develops this thesis, cold-bloodedly, to its logical extreme, and Seeck and numerous others are attracted by it in certain degree.

However, the advantage of mortality depends upon the impartiality of the application of its causes. Submit the whole population to a stress of living that results in a certain mortality, and this selection by death may well be advantageous to the race. It may weed out the weak, the biologically incompetent, the stupid, or the depraved. It may be a purification by fire.

But in the case of the mortality from war it is precisely this testing of the whole population, this randomness of exposure to its causes, that does not obtain. To my mind the immediate and the sufficient answer to the claims of those who see in war a biologically race-purifying agent, is the exposure of the character of the selection which war's mortality and injuries entail. Military selection is as far as possible removed from natural selection. It is peculiarly unnatural.

I believe that it may be shown by two methods that the direct selection of war is not advantageous, but in almost all cases thoroughly disadvantageous to the race. The two methods are: first, the determination of the character of that part of the population especially exposed to the selective mortality of war; and, second, the

determination of certain actual results of this selection.

As to the first, one learns immediately, when his attention is directed to the way in which armies are made up, that an army is not a cross-section of a population, not a general representative part of it, but a selected part of it. They who point to the advantage of military selection as certain to issue from the selective struggle between the opposing armies and from the selective results of the varying endurance and resistance to exposure, disease and wounds, of the individuals in each army, do not sufficiently consider the fact that the whole of each army consists of a group of individuals not chosen at random from the population and representing both sexes, all ages, and weak and strong alike, and is already, by the very conditions of its organization, a part of the population selected first for sex and then for ripe youth, full stature and strength, and freedom from infir mity and disease. So that practically every individual lost from an army means the loss of a man of better physical condition than that possessed by some other one man left behind in the civil population. For the actual figures of present-day recruitment in the great European states show that of the men gathered by conscription, as in France and Germany, or by voluntary enlistment, as in Great Britain, from 40 to 50 per cent are rejected by the examining boards as unfit for service because of undersize, infirmities, or disease.

For example, in the decade 18931902, out of a total of 679,703 men offering themselves for enlistment in England, 34.6 per cent were rejected as unfit for service, 9 per cent were rejected after three months' provisional acceptance, and 2.1 per cent were discharged as invalids within two years, making thus a total of 40 per cent of all those applying that were turned

back into the civil population as not physically fit men. In 1911, of the 64,538 men who offered themselves for enlistment in England, Scotland, and Wales, 28,900, or 44.78 per cent, were rejected for physical unfitness by the examining board. More than 63 per cent of all the applications for enlistment from the city of Edinburgh were rejected, and more than 57 per cent of those applying in Leeds. In London 36 per cent were rejected.

And these figures by no means reveal the closeness of this selection, for the requirements of height and chest measurements are so well known that men obviously under size or obviously infirm do not offer themselves, or if they do are at once rejected by the recruiting sergeants, so that they never reach the regular examining boards. Evidence presented to the Inter-Departmental committee on Physical Deterioration in the United Kingdom indicates that out of every one hundred men who offer to enlist in the British army only forty are accepted, sixty being returned to the civil population as physically unfit. And although it may be objected that the flower of the British working classes do not offer themselves for enlistment, yet it is admittedly true that the British army is not composed exclusively, or, indeed, by any means largely, of British riffraff. While many, perhaps a majority, of the applicants for enlistment are men out of work, a condition of temporary unemployment in Great Britain is by no means a certain indication of incompetency. No observer of presentday industrial conditions in England would claim this for a moment.

At any rate, this possible criticism of the shunning of the army by the better classes of young men can have no bearing in the case of the French and German conditions, where compulsory service obtains. In these countries

all the young men arriving at military age each year are liable to service, a certain proportion of them being chosen by lot to join the colors. The annual contingents, or 'classes,' examined, man by man, by carefully chosen boards, to determine the physical fitness or unfitness for military service of all this youth of France and Germany.

As a result of these personal examinations, France has, for nearly one hundred years now, regularly rejected as physically unfit from 30 to 40 per cent of those examined each year. Prussia has rejected, for many years, from 35 to 50 per cent. (This is, of course, I should mention in passing, no basis of comparison between the male youth of France and that of Prussia, for any slight difference in the requirements as to height or bodily condition, or in the rigor of applying the recruiting regulations, would account for the differences in proportion of rejected.)

The point of all this that I have just written seems to me plainly to be that military selection occurs chiefly before the fighting ever begins, and results in the temporary or permanent removal from the general population of a special part of it, and the deliberate exposure of this part to death and disease; disease that may have a repercussive tendency on the welfare of the whole population to a possibly much greater degree than is apparent at first glance. And this part of the people, so removed and injured, is in quite a special way of great importance to the preservation of the racial integrity of the population. For in the first place it is composed exclusively of men, its removal thus tending to disturb the sex-equilibrium of the population, and to prevent normal and advantageous sexual selection. Next, these men are all of them both of the age of greatest life-expectancy

after reaching maturity, and of greatest sexual vigor and fecundity. Finally, they are all men, none of whom fall below and most of whom exceed a certain desirable standard of physical vigor and freedom from infirmity and disease. And for each of these men so removed from the general population, at least one other man, falling below this standard, has been retained in the civil population.

The removal is effective even when the individuals are not all killed or injured, for during their time of service all these sturdy young men have no part in the racial propagation. And although after the required years of service they may, if returned alive, take up their part in this eugenic function, much of their value in this function has been lost, not only by inevitable preoccupation of their place for a certain number of years by inferior men, but, as I shall point out later, by a dangerous degeneration of many of them, while in service.

If one is inclined hastily to consider the number of men engaged in military service as so small as to be practically negligible in estimating the influences tending toward racial modification of a population, let him recall the fact that the French and German armies of to-day, on peace footings, number each more than half a million men in actual service. Germany's total by her new law, just going into effect, is more than 800,000. These numbers represent more than one per cent of the whole population of the two countries, and, which is more to the point, more than five per cent of each country's men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. France now takes annually into military service two out of three of all her young men arriving each year at military age. There have been, of course, times in her history when she has had to take all of these

young men who could possibly carry arms. Napoleon's grim remark apropos of the question of his personal riches, 'J'ai cent mille hommes de rente,' was the truth. And he lived up to his in

come.

Let him who is inclined to see in the removal of a selected five per cent of the men of reproducing age from a given population, no serious influence on the racial modification of that population, recall the fact of the increase by geometrical progression of the characteristics of any given type in the population; so that if one type starts with ever so slight an advantage in numbers, its preponderance over other types increases very swiftly. For example, Ammon has shown that if, of two types in a population, one has an average birth-rate of 3.3 and the other a birth-rate of but one tenth more, namely, 3.4, the second type will, in only twenty-three and one-half generations, be double the number of the other in the mixed population.

III

We may now ask if there is any direct evidence of the racially disadvantageous working of military selection. Seeck describes the difficulties experienced by the Roman Emperors in refilling their emptied armies with efficient Roman soldiers, because of the actual lack, after a long period of continuous war, of able-bodied citizen youth. Rome, in maintaining an army of about 350,000 men, required an annual recruitment of nearly half that number. The time came, however, when actually not more than 10,000 suitable men of Roman citizenship could be raised each year. Seeck finds the reason for this, not in actual reduction of numbers in the Empire, but in the race-deteriorating results of continued war through the removal from the

population by military selection of its best male reproducing element.

Napoleon's difficulties in the later years of the wars of the Empire were the parallel of the earlier Roman conditions. In order to make his conscription net gather its necessary load of doomed men he first had to reduce, in 1799, the minimum height of conscripts fit for service, which had been established by Louis XIV in 1701 at 1624mm, and had remained unchanged for a century, to 1598mm (an inch lower). In 1804 he lowered it two inches further, namely, to 1544mm, a total of three inches below the original standard. It remained at this figure till the Restoration, when (1818) it was raised by one inch and a quarter, that is, to 1570mm. Napoleon had also to reduce the figure of minimum military age.

Guerrini has shown that the mortality of German children between three and five years of age, born in 1870 and 1871, was higher than the corresponding mortality of children born in 1869 and 1872. For Prussia, for example, the numbers per one hundred are: 1869, 31.51; 1870, 33.83; 1871, 35.12; 1872, 32.76.

The mortality tables of France show that there has been a steady decrease since 1800 in the death-rate of children under five years with the exception of one period. In the decade 1815-1824, immediately following the terrible man-draining wars of the Revolution and the Empire the annual death-rate of children under five was higher by one and one half per cent than in the highest other period.

But the most conspicuous and definite example, so far determined, of race-deterioration through rigorous military selection and race-reparation by reason of an amelioration of its rigor, is that of the fluctuation in the height of Frenchmen during the past century.

Not a few unconsidered and exaggerated statements, as well as a good many hasty or overdriven criticisms, have been made concerning this matter. But if my own statements regarding it seem too swiftly or positively formulated, because offered here without any accompanying critical examination of the data on which the statements are founded, they are, let me say, really based on a rather exhaustive and, I hope, impartial consideration of both data and criticisms. In some future fuller paper, perhaps, I can so expose the matter that each may come to his own conclusions.

The French government has kept, since the beginning of the last century, detailed figures of height and freedom from or presence of infirmities, in the case of all the conscripts examined by its army boards. From these figures (not all published but all available) can be determined the number of men accepted for service and the number of men rejected because of undersize or bodily infirmity, and therefore the varying proportion of physically unfit to physically fit men arriving at the age of twenty in the successive years of the century.

From these figures it may be stated with confidence that the average height of the men of France began notably to decrease with the coming of age, in 1813 and after, of the young men born in the years of the Revolutionary wars (1792-1802), and that it continued to decrease in the following years with the coming of age of the youths born during the wars of the Empire. Soon after the cessation of these terrible mandraining wars, for the maintenance of which a great part of the able-bodied male population of France had been withdrawn from their families and the duties of reproduction, and much of this part actually sacrificed, a new type of boys began to be born. These

boys indeed had in them an inheritance of stature that carried them, by the time of their coming of age in the 1830's and 1840's, to a height one inch greater than that of the earlier generations born in war time. The average height of the annual conscription contingents born during the Napoleonic wars was about 1625mm; of those born after the wars it was about 1655mm.

This fluctuation in height of the young men of France produced, as an obvious result, a steady increase, and later decrease, in the numbers of conscripts exempted in successive years from military service because of undersize. Immediately after the Restoration, when the standard of minimum height was raised from 1544mm to 1570mm, certain French departments were quite unable to complete the number of men which they ought to furnish as young soldiers of sufficient height and vigor, according to the proportion of their population.

Running nearly parallel with the fluctuation in number of exemptions for undersize is the fluctuation in number of exemptions for infirmities. These exemptions increased by one third in twenty years. Exemptions for undersize and infirmities together nearly doubled in number. But the lessening again of the figure of exemptions for infirmities was not so easily accomplished as was that of the figure for undersize. The influence of the Napoleonic wars was felt by the nation, and revealed by its recruiting statistics, for a far longer time in its aspect of producing a racial deterioration as to vigor than in its aspect of producing a lessening of stature. And the importance in war, or in anything else, of vigor and capacity over size has been well shown us in late years by the Japanese.

There is probably no other such clear case of a race-deterioration caused by war which can be given such tangible