Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene. Ellis Havelock
of intelligence, of receptiveness, of adaptability, of thoroughness, of capacity for organisation, which ensure success in the arts and sciences of peace, in the whole work of civilisation. This is amply demonstrated by the immense progress and the manifold achievements of Germany during forty years of peace, which have enabled her to establish a prosperity and a good name in the world which are now both in peril. Germany must be built up again, and the interests of civilisation itself, which Germany has trampled under foot, demand that Germany shall be built up again, under conditions, let us hope, which will render her old ideals useless and out of date. We shall then be able to assert as the mere truisms they are, and not as a defiance flung in the face of one of the world's greatest nations, the elementary propositions I have here set forth. War is not a permanent factor of national evolution, but for the most part has no place in Nature at all; it has played a part in the early development of primitive human society, but, as savagery passes into civilisation, its beneficial effects are lost, and, on the highest stages of human progress, mankind once more tends to be enfolded, this time consciously and deliberately, in the general harmony of Nature.
III
WAR AND EUGENICS
In dealing with war it is not enough to discuss the place of warfare in Nature or its effects on primitive peoples. Even if we decide that the general tendency of civilisation is unfavourable to war we have scarcely settled matters. It is necessary to push the question further home. Primitive warfare among savages, when it fails to kill, may be a stimulating and invigorating exercise, simply a more dangerous form of dancing. But civilised warfare is a different kind of thing, to a very limited extent depending on, or encouraging, the prowess of the individual fighting men, and to be judged by other standards. What precisely is the measurable effect of war, if any, on the civilised human breed? If we want to know what to do about war in the future, that is the question we have to answer.
"Wars are not paid for in war-time," said Benjamin Franklin, "the bill comes later." Franklin, who was a pioneer in many so fields, seems to have been a pioneer in eugenics also by arguing that a standing army diminishes the size and breed of the human species. He had, however, no definite facts wherewith to demonstrate conclusively that proposition. Even to-day, it cannot be said that there is complete agreement among biologists as to the effect of war on the race. Thus we find a distinguished American zoologist, Chancellor Starr Jordan, constantly proclaiming that the effect of war in reversing selection is a great overshadowing truth of history; warlike nations, he declares, become effeminate, while peaceful nations generate a fiercely militant spirit.5 Another distinguished American scientist, Professor Ripley, in his great work, The Races of Europe, likewise concludes that "standing armies tend to overload succeeding generations with inferior types of men." A cautious English biologist, Professor J. Arthur Thomson, is equally decided in this opinion, and in his recent Galton Lecture6 sets forth the view that the influence of war on the race, both directly and indirectly, is injurious; he admits that there may be beneficial as well as deteriorative influences, but the former merely affect the moral atmosphere, not the hereditary germ plasm; biologically, war means wastage and a reversal of rational selection, since it prunes off a disproportionally large number of those whom the race can least afford to lose. On the other hand, another biologist, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, equally opposed to war, cannot feel certain that the total effect of even a great modern war is to deteriorate the stock, while in Germany, as we know, it is the generally current opinion, scientific and unscientific, equally among philosophers, militarists, and journalists, that not only is war "a biological necessity," but that it is peace, and not war, which effeminates and degenerates a nation. In Germany, indeed, this doctrine is so generally accepted that it is not regarded as a scientific thesis to be proved, but as a religious dogma to be preached. It is evident that we cannot decide this question, so vital to human progress, except on a foundation of cold and hard fact.
Whatever may be the result of war on the quality of the breed, there can be little doubt of its temporary effect on the quantity. The reaction after war may create a stimulating influence on the birth-rate, leading to a more or less satisfactory recovery, but it seems clear that the drafting away of a large proportion of the manhood of a nation necessarily diminishes births. At the present time English Schools are sending out an unusually small number of pupils into life, and this is directly due to the South-African War fifteen years ago. Still more obvious is the direct effect of war, apart from diminishing the number of births, in actually pouring out the blood of the young manhood of the race. In the very earliest stage of primitive humanity it seems probable that man was as untouched by warfare as his animal ancestors, and it is satisfactory to think that war had no part in the first birth of man into the world. Even the long Early Stone Age has left no distinguishable sign of the existence of warfare.7 It was not until the transition to the Late Stone Age, the age of polished flint implements, that we discern evidences of the homicidal attacks of man on man. Even then we are concerned more with quarrels than with battles, for one of the earliest cases of wounding known in human records, is that of a pregnant young woman found in the Cro-magnon Cave whose skull had been cut open by a flint several weeks before death, an indication that she had been cared for and nursed. But, again at the beginning of the New Stone Age, in the caverns of the Beaumes-Chaudes people, who still used implements of the Old Stone type, we find skulls in which are weapons of the New Stone type. Evidently these people had come in contact with a more "civilised" race which had discovered war. Yet the old pacific race still lingered on, as in the Belgian people of the Furfooz type who occupied themselves mainly with hunting and fishing, and have their modern representatives, if not their actual descendants, in the peaceful Lapps and Eskimo.8
It was thus at a late stage of human history, though still so primitive as to be prehistoric, that organised warfare developed. At the dawn of history war abounded. The earliest literature of the Aryans—whether Greeks, Germans, or Hindus—is nothing but a record of systematic massacres, and the early history of the Hebrews, leaders in the world's religion and morality, is complacently bloodthirsty. Lapouge considers that in modern times, though wars are fewer in number, the total number of victims is still about the same, so that the stream of bloodshed throughout the ages remains unaffected. He attempted to estimate the victims of war for each civilised country during half a century, and found that the total amounted to nine and a half millions, while, by including the Napoleonic and other wars of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he considered that that total would be doubled. Put in another form, Lapouge says, the wars of a century spill 120,000,000 gallons of blood, enough to fill three million forty-gallon casks, or to create a perpetual fountain sending up a jet of 150 gallons per hour, a fountain which has been flowing unceasingly ever since the dawn of history. It is to be noted, also, that those slain on the battlefield by no means represent the total victims of a war, but only about half of them; more than half of those who, from one cause or another, perished in the Franco-Prussian war, it is said, were not belligerents. Lapouge wrote some ten years ago and considered that the victims of war, though remaining about absolutely the same in number through the ages, were becoming relatively fewer. The Great War of to-day would perhaps have disturbed his calculations, unless we may assume that it will be followed by a tremendous reaction against war. For when the war had lasted only nine months, it was estimated that if it should continue at the present rate (and as a matter of fact its scale has been much enlarged) for another twelve months, the total loss to Europe in lives destroyed or maimed would be ten millions, about equal to five-sixths of the whole young manhood of the German Empire, and nearly the same number of victims as Lapouge reckoned as the normal war toll of a whole half-century of European "civilisation." It is scarcely necessary to add that all these bald estimates of the number of direct victims to war give no clue to the moral and material damage—apart from all question of injury to the race—done by the sudden or slow destruction of so large a proportion of the young manhood of the world, the ever widening circles of anguish and misery and destitution which every fatal bullet imposes on humanity, for it is probable that for every ten million soldiers who fall on the field, fifty million other persons at home are plunged into grief or poverty, or some form of life-diminishing trouble.
The foregoing considerations have not, however, brought us strictly within the field of eugenics.
D.S. Jordan,
J. Arthur Thomson, "Eugenics and War,"
It is true that in the Gourdon cavern, in the Pyrenees, representing a very late and highly developed stage of Magdalenian culture, there are indications that human brains were eaten (Zaborowski,
Zaborowski,