Essays in War-Time | Page 9

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. They indicate the great extent to which war
affects the human breed, but they do not show that war affects the
quality of the breed, and until that is shown the eugenist remains
undisturbed.
There are various circumstances which, at the outset, and even in the
absence of experimental verification, make it difficult, or impossible,
that even the bare mortality of war (for the eugenical bearings of war
are not confined to its mortality) should leave the eugenist indifferent.
For war never hits men at random. It only hits a carefully selected
percentage of "fit" men. It tends, in other words, to strike out,
temporarily, or in a fatal event, permanently, from the class of fathers,
precisely that percentage of the population which the eugenist wishes to
see in that class. This is equally the case in countries with some form of
compulsory service, and in countries which rely on a voluntary military
system. For, however an army is recruited, it is only those men
reaching a fairly high standard of fitness who are accepted, and these,
even in times of peace are hampered in the task of carrying on the race,
which the less fit and the unfit are free to do at their own good pleasure.
Nearly all the ways in which war and armies disturb the normal course
of affairs seem likely to interfere with eugenical breeding, and none to
favour it. Thus at one time, in the Napoleonic wars, the French age of
conscription fell to eighteen, while marriage was a cause of exemption,
with the result of a vast increase of hasty and ill-advised marriages

among boys, certainly injurious to the race. Armies, again, are highly
favourable to the spread of racial poisons, especially of syphilis, the
most dangerous of all, and this cannot fail to be, in a marked manner,
dysgenic rather than eugenic.
The Napoleonic wars furnished the first opportunity of testing the truth
of Franklin's assertion concerning the disastrous effect of armies on the
race, by the collection of actual and precise data. But the significance
of the data proved unexpectedly difficult to unravel, and most writers
on the subject