ttempted to
prove that the sufficient reason of war is a beneficent function of
which they believe it to be capable. This imaginary function is none
other than that of improving the race, and we may admit at once that, if
there were the slightest scientific basis for such a belief, the
bloodiest war would be morally justified, and it would be the religious
duty of every individual to kill as many as possible of his fellows for
the benefit of their descendants. But of course modern warfare so far
from improving the race must sensibly exhaust it. In ancient Sparta, and
generally whenever the conditions of warfare approximated to those of
personal combat, courage and the allied characteristics of mental as
well as of physical nobility must have had a survival value; whereas in
modern warfare which makes for the indiscriminate extermination of all
combatants, the result is exactly reversed. Our semi-scientific
militarists forget that the "survival of the fittest"[13] is in nature
essentially a process of selective elimination; and modern war is a
process of inverted selection which eliminates the brave, the
adventurous and the healthy; precisely those members of the community
who are best fitted to survive, that is to propagate their kind, in the
ordinary environment of political life. Conscription, indeed, spreading
a wider net than the voluntary system, may be described as an
institution for exposing the best citizens of a state to abnormal risks
of annihilation. As a matter of historic fact we are told, though I
don't know on what authority, that the Napoleonic wars, how much less
deadly than our own, reduced by an inch the average height of the French
nation.

So much, in brief, for the "scientific" justification of war. It is
evident that by the eugenic argument war could be defended only if we
agreed to send into battle precisely those men whom our recruiting
officers disqualify. A good deal might be said, from the sociologist's
point of view, in favour of a system of cathartic conscription which
would rejuvenate England with a watchword of "The Unfit to the
Trenches."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: They usually add to their mental confusion the elementary
blunder of using the word "fittest" in a moral instead of in its
biological sense.]

Sec. 3

Patriotism

If again there were any evidence to show that war and war alone kept
alive the spirit of true patriotism, it would be less easy to denounce
its manifold