V. L. Kellogg. Sociology and Eugenics.223
life. Throughout all the kingdom of life, plant as well as animal, the over
production of individuals and their reduction by death to a fractional part
of the original number is one of the basic conditions of progress, if
Darwinism is a sound explanation of organic evolution. For this death
will be in the nature of things selective, and hence will make for the
modification of the species toward a condition of better adaptation to life
conditions. Indeed, the upholders of war have used precisely the argument
of war’s high mortality as a proof of war’s real beneficence to the race.
Ammon, for example, consistently develops this thesis, cold-bloodedly, to its
logical extreme, and Seeck and numerous others are attracted by it in certain
degree. The crux in the matter and to my mind the whole answer to such
argument is the character of the selection which this mortality determines.
I believe it may be shown by two methods that the direct selection of war
is not advantageous, but in almost all cases thoroughly disadvantageous to
the race. The two methods are, first, the determination of the character
of that part of the population especially exposed to the selective mortality of
war, and, second, the determination of certain actual results of this
selection. As to the first, one need only draw attention to the way in which an
army is made up to make it seem certain that any considerable mortality in
military service will of necessity result in a disadvantageous selection of
greater or less seriousness. Those who point to the advantages of military
selection as issuing from the selective struggle between the opposing armies
and from the selective resuilts of the varying endurance and resistance to
exposure, disease and wounds of the individuals in each army, do not suffici
ently consider the fact that the whole of each army is a group of individuals
not chosen at random from the population, representing both sexes, all ages,
and weak and strong alike, but is already, by the very conditions of its
organization, a part of the population selected first for sex and then for ripe
youth, full stature and strength, and freedom from infirmity and disease. So
that practically every individual lost from an army means the loss of a man of
better physical condition than that possessed by one or more men left
behind in the civil population. For the actual figures of present-day
recruitment in the great European states show that of the men gathered by
conscription as in France and Germany, or by voluntary enlistment as in
Great Britain, from thirty to fifty per cent, are rejected by the examining
boards as unfit for service because of undersize, infirmities, or disease.
For example, in the decade 1893-1902 out of a total 679,703 men offering
themselves for enlistment in England, 34.6 per cent, were rejected as unfit
for service, .9 per cent, were rejected after three months’ provisional
acceptance, and 2.1 per cent, were discharged as invalids within two
years, making thus a total of 40 per cent, of all those applying that were
turned back into the civil population as not physically fit men. Last year
