222Section III.V. L. Kellogg.
Tiedemann and Seeck in Germany; Guerrini in Italy. And all of these
men have offered something, if in most cases but a little, in the way of
specific facts and figures to substantiate their belief in the racial injury
caused by war.
On the other hand there has been at the same time a succession of critics
either of the thesis itself or of the specific data offered to prove it. Of
these critics I may mention Collignon and Broca in France, Bischoff and
Ammon in Germany, and Livi in Italy. And these critics must be fairly
heard. Stress is put in most writings against war on the imposing figures of the
actual human mortality due to it. To state that 5,000,000 or 10,000,000 men
were ¡lost in the twenty years of the Wars of the Restoration and Empire
is, indeed, to give one food for thought. One becomes more thoughtful
when one learns that one-third of these men came from a single nation,
whose total population at the beginning of the period was but 25,000,000.
The Thirty Years’ War is reputed to have cost Germany nearly three-fourths
of her fighting men. In the last quarter of the 19th century the direct war
losses totalled several human millions.
And these figures of mortality by gunfire and exposure and disease in
camp and garrison should have added to them the indeterminate but certainly
greater figures of deaths in the civil population directly incident to war. Dr.
Dumas has shown recently that the death rate in the civil population of both
France and Germany was noticeably higher in 1870 and 1871 than in the
years immediately preceding and immediately following these two years of
strenuous war. In France, for example, it was 2.34 per 100 in 1869, 2.83
in 1870, 3.48 in 1871, and 2.19 in 1872. Dumas found similar examples
in the mortality records of Austria, Denmark, and Germany.
Many specific observations of the introduction or distribution of disease
in the civil population by the movements of armies or return of soldiers
have been made. The diffusion of typhus in Europe by the Napoleonic
Wars, the introduction of syphilis into Scotland by Cromwell’s troops and
into Sweden in 1762 by the Swedish troops returning from the Seven Years’
War are examples. During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign nearly every
soldier out of an army of 32,000 men was affected by trachoma, and the
return of these soldiers initiated a spread of the disease through almost all
the European armies. The great European epidemic of smallpox of 1871,
especially notable in Germany, is believed to be associated with the Franco-
Prussian War. Clemow declares, indeed, that there is scarcely a war in
ancient or modern times which does not furnish examples of the special
distribution of disease.
But great mortality in itself is not necessarily a great racial catas
trophe. Indeed it is, in the face of the geometrical progression by which
reproduction advances, one of the veritable conditions of advance in animal
