young volunteer's, will be like? And
a very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason:

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man
inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the
very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence. For instead
of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of
the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations
yet unborn. And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised,
humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same ill
effect.

In the first place, tens of thousands--Who knows it not?--lead sedentary
and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a
fraction of their bodies as of their minds. And all this in dwellings,
workshops, what not?--the influences, the very atmosphere of which tend
not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under the
feeling of unhealth and depression. And that such a life must tell upon
their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar
circumstances, upon their offspring's offspring, till a whole population
may become permanently degraded, who does not know? For who that walks
through the by-streets of any great city does not see? Moreover, and
this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation
has to deal--we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious
care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit to
live, we save alive those who--looking at them from a merely physical
point of view--are most fit to die. Everything which makes it more easy
to live; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medical
discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in
dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every
hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which
has--so I am told--increased the average length of life in these islands,
by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances,
one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say,
saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority
of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least
resisting power; who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less
powerful progeny.

Do I say that we ought not to save these people, if we c