quantitative measure, as this French one. And yet the data from Saxony and Prussia, so far as studied, point strongly to a certain degree of positive result, even if one less conspicuous as to quantity and less susceptible of accurate determination. In Italy, Livi has gathered in his monumental Anthropologia Militare a host of statistics of Italian conditions, from which can be seen with fair clearness a quantitative race-deterioration in certain critical periods. I say this in the face of Livi's own conclusions which are on the whole opposed to the statement. His attention however is chiefly given to attempts to determine if a race-deteriorating influence of the Italian wars can be demonstrated in comparing certain departments of the country with each other. In this attempt he comes to negative results only.

The evidence regarding the results of the short but severe Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 is going to be, when worked out in detail, of much interest. In France the results seem to be plain as to an increase in the classes of 189192 (twenty years later) of exemptions for undersize but not for infirmities. However, the whole subject is very complex. The possible race-modifying results of variations in crop conditions and general prosperity, in industrial changes and in emigration, and so forth, have to be kept ever in the investigator's mind. As also the apparent possibility always of an actual racial advantage from the selective influence of a short swift war which may go no further in its destructiveness than to weed out the weaker from the armies and to return fairly intact the stronger after only a short absence from home.

But with all the difficulties of clearing the statistics from extraneous modifications, there is available in the data of the recruiting records of the European countries actual basis for statisti

cal proof and quantitative measure of the dysgenic or race-deteriorating influence of serious wars. There are tangible illustrations of the logical thesis of the biologist and student of human heredity: which is, simply, that the racial character of the next generation is inevitably influenced by any factor that increases or decreases the part played in race-propagation by any selected type of the population. If the removal of the taller men of the population by military conscription and military death decreases or inhibits their share in race-population, the stature of the next generation will be lessened. If these men are also the physically stronger, the less infirm, the nondefective, the proportion of weaker, infirm and defective in the next generation will be increased. The actual percentage of that increase can be declared wherever there are available sufficient statistics.

IV

But I have another aspect of the dysgenic influence of war to touch upon. It is an aspect that has especially attracted my interest recently, and one which does not seem to have been much emphasized before. It is the relation of war to human disease, and particularly to a special type of disease, whose results are, above all else, directly race-deteriorating in effect. I do not mean to say that the special danger from disease to men in military service has been overlooked by students of public hygiene or by the advocates of peace. I mean that no particular stress seems to have been put so far on the immediately race-degenerating influence of some of this disease. But first a few words as to the correlation of military service and disease in general.

In times of war, disease has always reaped a far greater harvest of deaths and permanent bodily breakdown in

the army than have the bullets and bayonets of battle. The twenty per cent of mortality by gun-fire in such bloody affairs as Austerlitz and Wagram, Moscow, Lützen, Magenta, Solferino, and Waterloo, was increased by disease in the same campaigns to the appalling proportion of 60 and even 70 per cent. In the terrible twentyyear stretch of the Napoleonic campaigns the British army had an average annual ratio of mortality from all causes of 56.21 per cent per 1000 men; the mortality from disease was 49.61 per 1000, leaving the direct losses from gun-fire to be only 7.60 per 1000. The British losses in the Crimea in two and one-half years were 3 per cent by gun-fire and 20 per cent by disease.

And this is the story of war from the earliest days even up to the very present. Fortunately, there has been a fairly steady decline in the relative figures of loss by disease as we read the story from past to present days. But there has occurred so far but a single radical exception to the general rule: this is, of course, the record of the Japanese armies in the Russo-Japanese war. Our own enlightened country lost, proportionately, many more soldiers in its last war, a few years ago, from groups that never got within sight of the enemy than from among those who had the opportunity of charging up San Juan Hill. And all these losses by disease in war times are, in proportion, it is needless to say, far in excess of the losses that occur at the same time in the civil population.

Even in times of peace, despite the fact that soldiers are cared for under conditions that should make disease among them more easily prevented and more easily controlled than in the case of the bulk of the civil population, and despite the fact that the men in military service have already passed a selective test, which weeded out from

among them all individuals already tainted by obvious organic and constitutional disease, it has not been until the years of the present decade that the long-enduring rule of a higher mortality in time of peace in the military than in the civil population has been broken.

In the first decade after the Restoration, the mortality from disease in the French army at home was barely less than twice that among men of the same age in the civil population. In the middle of the last century the mortality among the armies on peace footing in France, Prussia, and England was almost exactly 50 per cent greater than among the civil population. When parts of the armies were serving abroad, especially if in the tropics, the mortality was greatly increased. For example, among the British troops serving abroad, outside of the tropics, the mortality was one third more than in the army at home; when serving in the tropics it was four times as great. Finally, in addition to all this actual high mortality among the military part of the population, a part specially selected for full stature, vigor, and freedom from infirmity, we must remember the constant invaliding home of the broken-down men to join the civil population. From the eugenic point of view this may be the most serious feature of disease in armies.

But the humane war against disease has made life safer for the soldier. In 1909 the mortality in the British army, both at home and abroad, was actually slightly less than that among men of the same age in England and Wales. Let us hope that it will continue so. Statistics collated in 1887 by Robert Lawson, inspector-general of British military hospitals, show that while from 1873 to 1894 there was always a greater proportion of deaths from phthisis in the army than among men of the same age in the civil population, and how

suggestive this is, when we recall that the examining boards reject all obviously phthisis-tainted men from the recruits!- yet this proportion changed from nearly two to one in 1877 to three to two in 1884.

An interesting record, also, is that for typhoid fever in the French army, a record which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Brouardel for a special French commission on military hygiene. The mean annual strength of the French army in France, Algeria, and Tunis in the thirteen-year period, 1872-1884, was 413,493 men, with mean annual deaths from typhoid of 1,357, and mean annual cases 11,640, or one typhoid case to every 36 soldiers! Since the '70's and '80's, however, there has been a rapid lowering of both typhoid cases and deaths; the annual number of deaths per 10,000 men having been reduced from 32.1 in the five-year period, 1876-1880, to 8.7 in the five-year period, 1896–1900. And in 1901 there were but 5.7 deaths per 10,000. This result comes from the lessening of the number of cases and not from a lower proportion of deaths to cases, this ratio having remained at about 12 per cent from 1870 to 1900. The loss from typhoid is now no greater in the army than among the men of similar age in the civil population of France.

But the actual dysgenic importance of the diseases fostered and diffused by military service, though certainly real, is mostly hard to get at in any quantitative way. The problem of the inheritance of disease, or of the inheritance of the diathesis of disease, has only in the last few years begun to receive the scientific elucidation necessary to its proper consideration from the eugenic point of view. Concerning the congenital transmission and eugenic importance of one terrible disease, however, and one that more than any single

other is characteristic of military service, there is no shadow of doubt. It is a disease communicable by husband to wife, by mother to children, and by children to their children. It is a disease that causes more suffering and disaster than phthisis or cancer. It is a disease accompanied by a dread cloud of other ills that it causes, such as paralysis, malformations, congenital blindness, idiocy and insanity, all of them particularly dysgenic in character. It is a disease that renders marriage an abomination and child-bearing a social danger. And as a crowning misfortune it does not kill but only ruins its victims. While phthisis and cancer carry off their subjects at the rate, in England to-day, of 1000 per year to each 1,000,000 of the population, syphilis kills but a small fraction of 1000 a year, - a number unfortunately indeterminate under the present confused methods of registration, but certainly not exceeding ten. It is then not a purifying, but altogether a contaminating disease.

I have called this disease (and with it I may include the two more common forms of venereal disease) a scourge fostered especially by militarism. It is the cause of more hospital admissions among soldiers than any other disease. It caused 31.8 per cent of the total military inefficiency in the British army in 1910. It was the cause of one fifth of all the military hospital admissions for that year, yet it caused but one onehundredth of the total military deaths.

And it is only in very recent years that the scourge has been no worse than it is now. In 1895 the admissions to hospital for venereal disease in the British army in India reached the enormous proportion of 537 per 1000 men. I hasten to add that this frightful condition has been greatly ameliorated.

Nor is the British army by any means the greatest sufferer from the

scourge. The United States army has twice as many hospital admissions for this same cause. Russia has about as many as Great Britain, Austria and France less, and Germany least of all. Germany, indeed, has done much more to control the disease than any other great nation, unless it be Japan, for which I have been unable to get data.

As venereal disease is not included in the list of notifiable diseases in Great Britain, it certainly ought to be, it is impossible to state exactly its proportion of abundance in the civil population. But this fact is most suggestive: of the young men who offered themselves for enlistment in the British army in 1910, 311⁄2 per 10,000 were rejected because of their contamination by venereal disease, while in the same year there were 1000 admissions into hospital for such infection per 10,000 men in the army. In other words, while the army recruiting boards discover in the civil population and reject back into it but 31 men suffering from venereal disease per 10,000 examined, the army finds within itself a constant proportion of attainted men of many times that number. It is, indeed, a very breeding ground of the most dysgenic of human diseases.

The Germans, I have said, keep their army freer from disease than does any other nation, unless it be Japan. In fact it is from German sources particularly that come the claims that military service is, if not actually a eugenic agent, at least a euthenic one. That is, that it provides a special advantage to developing manhood in its compulsory exercise, enforced habits of discipline, unescapable stimulus to patriotism and general moral control. As a German general put it at the recent International Eugenics Congress, military service is not injurious to the body but healthful, and not depressing to mind and spirit but inspiring.

If this should be granted for Germany, or for any other country as advanced in medical science and as effectively ruled, what of the effects of actual war on this specially selected and zealously cared-for part of the population? Would not the sacrifice be only the more costly and injurious to the nation?

Despite all delusive phrases to the contrary, the maintenance of an army is a preparation for war and a step toward war and not toward peace. Do governments, or will they, maintain this blessing of military service for the health and eugenic advantage of the people? Is it not done solely from the stimulus of expected war? Is it not done solely with the full expectancy and deliberate intention of some time offering this particularly selected and cared-for part of the population to the exposure of wholesale mutilation and death; this death to come, if at all, before this extra-vigorous part of the population has taken its share in racepropagation, which is the precise function the performance of which the race most needs from it?

I simply cannot see the eugenic advantage of war. On the contrary, not only do I think I can see from the standpoint of the biologist and student of heredity a plausible, logical case for the dysgenic effect of war and military service, but I also believe that we have accessible, actual statistical proof of this deplorable effect. We have in figures a quantitative measure of the hereditary effect of military selection. It is a race-deteriorating effect; the kind of effect that above almost any other kind makes an obstacle in human evolutionary advance. The most economical and most positive factor in human progress is good breeding. Race-deterioration comes chiefly from its opposite, bad breeding. Militarism encourages bad breeding.

CHAPTER XVII (continued)

IN WHICH WE WITNESS A SURRENDER

WHEN he came aboard, the cook reported that his friend had been a mite restive, although he was asleep again now. 'Would n't wonder if he was jest about on the edge of seein' 'em pink rats and such,' he remarked, not without some pleasant excitement. And he kindly volunteered to sit up in case Van wanted help through the night. 'I've had experience,' he said; which indeed was highly likely. But fortunately those extreme measures were not necessary. Van Cleve went sound asleep, rolled up in his blanket on the deck. And when he waked up in the morning, with a start and the sensation of something unfinished and impending, which had got to be habitual with him these last three weeks, Bob himself was the first person he saw.

The poor fellow was completely sobered by now, and had got up and bathed and straightened his hair and clothing as best he might; and sat by Van Cleve, evidently watching and waiting for him to wake, with a grave and patient air. He smiled eagerly as their eyes met; Van Cleve put out his hand, and the other slid his own cold and shaking one into it with a confiding gesture, like a child. "Top o' the morning, sir!' he said, and coughed. He had to take away his hand and clasp it against his chest in a fit of coughing.

Van Cleve did not speak for a mo

ment. He was thinking, inconsequently enough, that in all their intimacy he could not remember ever to have heard Bob tell a foul story; even at his worst and lowest, even drunk and lying in the gutter, there had always been a kind of decency about Bob. It must be mental, seeing that it could be neither moral nor physical; but could a man's mind be clean, when soul and body were so debased? While he was considering this paradox, Bob began to speak again.

'Just as soon as you're up and have had your breakfast, Van, there's something I'd like to talk to you about,' he said, with an earnestness that sat strangely on him who was by nature so irresponsible. 'I've read those letters from Lorrie and father -I can't make 'em out - they're so solemn and mysterious, begging me to do my duty, and come home with you, and all that, just as if they expected I'd make a row about it. What would I be doing that for? I'd just as soon go home as not. I've seen all I want to. Lorrie's letter is all wild and hysterical anyhow poor girl! She's about heartbroken.' The ready tears came into Bob's eyes. 'Why, of course I'm coming home with you. I'd go back on Lorrie's account anyhow. She wants to know about Cort.' Bob's face grew grave again. He fingered the letters which were spread open on his knees. "There's something else I've got to tell you to ask you about, I mean. It's important. But you go ahead and get freshened up first. There's coffee; shan't I get you some coffee?'