ideas: France, which went into the Revolutionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century to establish the republican idea throughout Europe, emerged as an empire; and the defeat of the Russian by the German imperialism led to Lenin's 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' The essence of success in the biological struggle for existence is preferential reproduction; whereas the modern war-process takes all the sturdier males to kill and be killed haphazard, while it sends all the more intelligent and energetic girls into munition factories, substitute work, and such like sterilizing occupations. If it prefers any type for prosperity and multiplication, it is the alert shirker, the able tax-dodger, and the war profiteer; if it breeds anything, it breeds parasites. The vital statistics of Germany, which is certainly the most perfect as a belligerent of all the belligerent states engaged, show already tremendous biological injuries. Germany in the first four years of the war had lost by the fall in her birthrate alone nearly 2,600,000 lives, approximately 40,000 per million of the population; Hungary in the same period lost 1,500,000 (about 70,000 per million); the United Kingdom 50,000 (or about 10,000 per million). Add to this loss of lives the under-nutrition of the millions who were born, and their impoverished upbringing. These things strike at the victors as well as at the vanquished. They are entirely indiscriminate as among good types and bad, while on the whole the battlefield destroys rather the good than the 'unfit for service,' who remain at home to breed.

The whole process which, on a vaster scale, has brought Europe to its present plight may be seen in miniature among the tribes of the Indian frontier. Go up the Khyber Pass and stand on the ridge above Ali Masjid. In front lies a desolate valley, flanked by barren mountains under a blistering sun. On the slopes to right and left, at intervals of about a thousand yards, are oblong inclosures, each with brown walls and a little loopholed tower at one corner. These inclosures are the villages of the Pathan tribes which inhabit the valley, and in the towers are men with rifles,

waiting their chance to shoot man or boy who may rashly expose himself outside a neighboring village. For all or nearly all of them are at feud with each other, and though the causes of their warfare are forgotten, it is a point of honor and pride with them never to become reconciled. Every Pathan believes, or until quite recently did believe, that manliness, patriotism, and chivalry would perish if there were no feuds. There have been, roughly, three stages in the history of these feuds. In the first, men fought with knives, daggers, and other primitive weapons, and the result may have been, as a German would argue, 'biologically good.' The fittest survived, the population was kept from increasing beyond the number which an inhospitable soil would support, the arts of peace, such as they were, could be pursued without serious interruption. The second stage was reached when the flint-lock rifle came on the scene and took the place of knife and dagger. With this the vendetta necessarily became more of a national industry; but the weapon was short of range and irregular in its killing power, and there was still a fair chance of survival, and a certain presumption that the better or more skillful man would escape. But before the end of the nineteenth century the village marksmen had possessed themselves of the Martini-Henry and other long-range high-velocity rifles, brought from Europe by the gun-runners of the Persian Gulf. At this, the third stage, the biological merits of village warfare manifestly began to disappear. The village marksman in his mud-tower now makes the whole valley his zone of fire. Cultivation becomes impossible in the no-man's land between village and village; only behind the cover of the village wall can men sow or plough or reap, tether their cattle, or graze their sheep. Every village must be provided with a communication-trench, so that its inhabitants may pass under cover to the sanctuary - guaranteed twice in the week of the government-protected road which runs down the centre of the valley. The question now is, not whether the vendetta is biologically good, but whether the tribes

can at all survive under it; and weary officials, at a loss to solve the vexed problem which they offer to the government of India, have been heard to suggest that, if a few machine-guns could be conveyed to the village marksmen and installed in the mudtowers, there would soon be no frontier problem at all.

The question which the civilized world has now to consider is, whether it can survive, or its life be more tolerable than that of these tribesmen under a vendetta of high explosives.

So that when the biological critic says, 'Life is Conflict,' we reply, without traversing his premises, that war, having ceased to be conflict in any discriminating sense, has become indiscriminate catastrophe, and that the selective processes which enlarge and enrich life can go on far more freely and effectively in a world from which this blundering, disastrous, non-selective, and even possibly dysgenic form of wastage is banished. But we have to bear in mind that this reply puts upon those who are preparing schemes for a League of Nations the onus of providing for progress, competition, and liberty under the restraints of such a scheme.

It may be worth while to take up and consider here a group of facts that are sometimes appealed to as a justification of war. It is alleged that there has been an extraordinarily rapid development of mechanical, chemical, and medical science since 1914, and a vast and valuable accumulation of experience in social and industrial organization. There has been great mental stimulation everywhere; people have been forced out of grooves and idle and dull ways of living, into energetic exertion; there has been in particular a great release and invigoration of feminine spirit and effort. The barriers set up by the monopolization of land and material by private owners for selfish ends have been broken down in many cases.

There can be no denying the substantial truth in these allegations. Indisputably there has been such a release and stimulation. But this is a question of proportion between benefits and

losses. And all this stir, we argue, has been bought at too great a cost. It is like accelerating the speed of a ship by burning its cargo and timbers as fuel. At best, it is the feverish and wasteful reaping of a long-accumulated harvest.

We must remember that a process may be evil as a whole while in part it is beneficial. It would be stupid to deny that for countless minds the Great War has provided an enlightening excitement which could have been provided in no other way. To deny that would be to assert the absolute aimlessness and incoherence of being. But while this harvest of beneficial bye-products of the war is undeniable, there is no evidence of any fresh sowing, or, if the process of belligerence and warlike preparation is to continue, of any possibility of an adequate fresh sowing of further achievements. The root from which all the shining triumphs of technical and social science spring, we must remember, is the quiet and steadfast pursuit of pure science and philosophy and literature by those best endowed for these employments. And if the greedy expansion of the war-process is to continue, and we have shown that without an organized world-peace it must continue,

there is nothing to reassure us of the continuance of that soil of educated public opinion, that supply of free and vigorous educated intelligence, in which alone that root can flourish. On the contrary, it is one of the most obvious and most alarming aspects of the war-process that university education has practically ceased in Europe; Europe is now producing only schoolboys, and the very schools are understaffed and depleted. The laboratories of the English public schools are no longer making the scientific men of the future, they are making munitions. It is all very well for the scientific man of fifty to say that at last he has got his opportunity; but that is only a momentary triumph for science. Where now is the great scientific man for the year 1930? Smashed to pieces in an aeroplane, acting as a stretcher-bearer, or digging a trench. And what, unless we can secure the peace of the world, will become of the potential scientific men of 1950?

Suppose it to be possible to carry on this present top-heavy militarist system for so long a period as that, what will have happened then to our potential Faradays, Newtons, and Darwins? They will be at best half educated; they will be highly trained soldiers, robbed of their intellectual inheritance and incapable of rendering their gifts to the world. The progress of knowledge will be slowing down toward stagnation.

VI

A considerable amount of opposition to the League of Nations movement may be classified under the heading of Objections from precedent and prepossession. The mind is already occupied by the idea of attachment to some political system which stands in the way of a world-league. These objections vary very much in intellectual quality. Nevertheless, even the most unintelligent demand some attention, because numerically these antagonists form considerable masses. Collectively, in their unorganized way, they produce a general discouragement and hostility far more formidable than any soundly reasoned case against an organized world-peace.

The objection from prepossession is necessarily protean: it takes various forms because men's preposessions are various; but 'There never has been a League of Nations, and there never will be,' may be regarded as the underlying idea of most of these forms. And the objector relapses upon his prepossession as the only possible thing. A few years ago people were saying, 'Men have never succeeded in flying, and they never will.' And we are told, particularly by people who have obviously never given human nature ten minutes' thought in their lives, that worldunity is against human nature.' To substantiate these sweeping negatives, the objecter will adduce a heterogeneous collection of instances to show the confusions and contradictions of the human will, and a thousand cases of successful mass-coöperations will be ignored. We are moved to doubt at last whether human beings