Essays in War-Time | Page 4

the place of
warfare in Nature and the effect of war on the human race. These have
long been debated problems concerning which there is no complete
agreement. But until we make up our minds on these fundamental
questions we can gain no solid ground from which to face serenely, or
at all events firmly, the crisis through which mankind is now passing.
It has been widely held that war has played an essential part in the
evolutionary struggle for survival among our animal ancestors, that war
has been a factor of the first importance in the social development of
primitive human races, and that war always will be an essential method
of preserving the human virtues even in the highest civilisation. It must
be observed that these are three separate and quite distinct propositions.
It is possible to accept one, or even two, of them without affirming
them all. If we wish to clear our minds of confusion on this matter, so
vital to our civilisation, we must face each of the questions by itself.
It has sometimes been maintained--never more energetically than
to-day, especially among the nations which most eagerly entered the
present conflict--that war is a biological necessity. War, we are told, is
a manifestation of the "Struggle for Life"; it is the inevitable
application to mankind of the Darwinian "law" of natural selection.
There are, however, two capital and final objections to this view. On
the one hand it is not supported by anything that Darwin himself said,

and on the other hand it is denied as a fact by those authorities on
natural history who speak with most knowledge. That Darwin regarded
war as an insignificant or even non-existent part of natural selection
must be clear to all who have read his books. He was careful to state
that he used the term "struggle for existence" in a "metaphorical sense,"
and the dominant factors in the struggle for existence, as Darwin
understood it, were natural suitability to the organic and inorganic
environment and the capacity for adaptation to circumstances; one
species flourishes while a less efficient species living alongside it
languishes, yet they may never come in actual contact and there is
nothing in the least approaching human warfare. The conditions much
more resemble what, among ourselves, we may see in business, where
the better equipped species, that is to say, the big capitalist, flourishes,
while the less well equipped species, the small capitalist, succumbs. Mr.
Chalmers Mitchell, Secretary of the London Zoological Society and
familiar with the habits of animals, has lately emphasised the
contention of Darwin and shown that even the most widely current
notions of the extermination of one species by another have no
foundation in fact.[1] Thus the thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, the
fiercest of the marsupials, has been entirely driven out of Australia and
its place taken by a later and higher animal, of the dog family, the
dingo. But there is not the slightest reason to believe that the dingo ever
made war on the thylacine. If there was any struggle at all it was a
common struggle against the environment, in which the dingo, by
superior intelligence in finding food and rearing young, and by greater
resisting power to climate and disease, was able to succeed where the
thylacine failed. Again, the supposed war of extermination waged in
Europe by the brown rat against the black rat is (as Chalmers Mitchell
points out) pure fiction. In England, where this war is said to have been
ferociously waged, both rats exist and flourish, and under conditions
which do not usually even bring them into competition with each other.
The black rat (_Mus rattus_) is smaller than the other, but more active
and a better climber; he is the rat of the barn and the granary. The
brown or Norway rat (_Mus decumanus_) is larger but less active, a
burrower rather than a climber, and though both rats are omnivorous
the brown rat is more especially a scavenger; he is the rat of sewers and
drains. The black rat came to Northern Europe first--both of them

probably being Asiatic animals--and has no doubt been to some extent
replaced by the brown rat, who has been specially favoured by the
modern extension of drains and sewers, which exactly suit his peculiar
tastes. But each flourishes in his own environment; neither of them is
adapted to the other's environment; there is no war between them, nor
any occasion for war, for they do not really come into competition with
each other. The cockroaches, or "blackbeetles," furnish another
example. These pests are comparatively modern and their great
migrations in recent times are largely due to the activity of human
commerce. There are three main species of cockroach--the Oriental, the
American, and the German (or Croton