end more than three
hundred million pounds each year merely that they may keep armaments in
readiness to fly at one another's throats should occasion arise.
Formidable as these armaments now seem, however, the developments of the
not very distant future will probably make them quite obsolete; and
sooner or later, as science develops yet more deadly implements of
destruction, the time must come when communal intelligence will rebel at
the suicidal folly of the international attitude that characterized, for
example, the opening decade of the 20th century. At some time, after the
first period of cosmopolitanism shall be ushered in as a tenth ethnic
period, it will come to be recognized that there is a word fraught with
fuller meanings even than the word patriotism. That word is
humanitarianism. The enlightened generation that realizes the full
implications of that word will doubtless marvel that their ancestors of
the third period of civilization should have risen up as nations and
slaughtered one another by thousands to settle a dispute about a
geographical boundary. Such a procedure will appear to have been quite
as barbarous as the cannibalistic practices of their yet more remote
ancestors, and distinctly less rational, since cannibalism might
sometimes save its practiser from starvation, whereas warfare of the
civilized type was a purely destructive agency.

Equally obvious must it appear to the cosmopolite of some generation of
the future that quality rather than mere numbers must determine the
efficiency of any given community. Race suicide will then cease to be a
bugbear; and it will no longer be considered rational to keep up the
census at the cost of propagating low orders of intelligence, to feed
the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals. On the contrary it will
be thought fitting that man should become the conscious arbiter of his
own racial destiny to the extent of applying whatever laws of heredity
he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has
long applied them in the case of domesticated animals. The survival and
procreation of the unfit will then cease to be a menace to the progress
of civilization. It does not follow that all men will be brought to a
dead level of equality of body and mind, nor that individual competition
will cease; but the average physical mental status of the race will be
raised immeasurably through the virtual elimination of that vast company
of defectives