re,
the human race deteriorates under war. If this be so, if we have sent
forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were left,
and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and are what we
splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid and god-like beings
must have been our forebears those ten thousand millenniums ago!
Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan's theory, those ancient forebears cannot
live up to this fine reputation. We know them for what they were, and
before the monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints
and resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago. And
by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the planet, those
ape-like creatures have developed even into you and me. As Henley has
said in "The Song of the Sword":

"_The Sword Singing_--

Driving the darkness,
Even as the banners
And spear of the Morning;
Sifting the nations,
The Slag from the metal,
The waste and the weak
From the fit and the strong;
Fighting the brute,
The abysmal Fecundity;
Checking the gross
Multitudinous blunders,
The groping, the purblind
Excesses in service
Of the Womb universal,
The absolute drudge."

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in
search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of
men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell under the sword.
Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich
river deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were
nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more
capable with the sword. Unknown and unnumbered billions of men have been
so destroyed in prehistoric times. Draper says that in the twenty years
of the Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; "and that the
wars, famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the
human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000." Germany,
in the Thirty Years' War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants. The record of our
own American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword. Flood,
famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducing
population--in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his "Expansion
of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the Yellow River
burst, 7,000,000 people