Finally, of course, we are told that even though these forces are at work, they must take “thousands of years” to operate. This dogmatism ignores the Law of Acceleration, as true in the domain of sociology as in that of physics, which I have touched on at the close of the preceding chapter. The most recent evidence would seem to show that man as a fire-using animal dates back to the Tertiary epoch—say, three hundred thousand years. Now, in all that touches this discussion, man in Northern Europe (in Great Britain, say) remained unchanged for two hundred and ninety-eight thousand of those years. In the last two thousand years he changed more than in the two hundred and ninety-eight thousand preceding, and in one hundred he has changed more, perhaps, than in the preceding two thousand. The comparison becomes more understandable if we resolve it into hours. For, say, fifty years the man was a cannibal savage or a wild animal, hunting other wild animals, and then in the space of three months he became John Smith of Des Moines, attending church, passing laws, using the telephone, and so on. That is the history of European mankind. And in the face of it, the wiseacres talk sapiently, and lay it down as a self-evident and demonstrable fact that interstate war, which, by reason of the mechanics of our civilization, accomplishes nothing and can accomplish nothing, will forever be unassailable because, once man has got the habit of doing a thing, he will go on doing it, although the reason which in the first instance prompted it has long since disappeared—because, in short, of the “unchangeability of human nature.”
IV
Do the Warlike Nations Inherit the Earth?
The confident dogmatism of militarist writers on this subject—The facts—The lessons of Spanish America—How conquest makes for the survival of the unfit—Spanish method and English method in the New World—The virtues of military training—The Dreyfus case—The threatened Germanization of England—“The war which made Germany great and Germans small.”
The militarist authorities I have quoted in the preceding chapter admit, therefore, and admit very largely, man’s drift, in a sentimental sense, away from war. But that drift, they declare, is degeneration; without those qualities which “war alone,” in Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase, can develop, man will “rot and decay.”
This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that the qualities which we associate with war, and nothing else but war, are necessary to assure a nation success in its struggles with other nations is equivalent to saying that those who drift away from war will go down before those whose warlike activity can conserve those qualities essential to survival; and this is but another way of saying that men must always remain warlike if they are to survive, that the warlike nations inherit the earth; that men’s pugnacity, therefore, is the outcome of the great natural law of survival, and that a decline of pugnacity marks in any nation a retrogression and not an advance in its struggle for survival. I have already indicated (Chapter II, Part II) the outlines of the proposition, which leaves no escape from this conclusion. This is the scientific basis of the proposition voiced by the authorities I have quoted—Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, Nietzsche, and various of the warlike clergy68—and it lies at the very bottom of the plea that man’s nature, in so far as it touches the tendency of men as a whole to go to war, does not change; that the warlike qualities are a necessary part of human vitality in the struggle for existence; that, in short, all that we know of the law of evolution forbids the conclusion that man will ever lose this warlike pugnacity, or that nations will survive other than by the struggle of physical force.
The view is best voiced, perhaps, by Homer Lea, whom I have already quoted. He says, in his Valor of Ignorance:
As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor constitutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws, constitutions are but temporary effulgences [p. 11]. The deterioration of the military force and the consequent destruction of the militant spirit have been concurrent with national decay [p. 24]. International disagreements are … the result of the primordial conditions that sooner or later cause war … the law of struggle, the law of survival, universal, unalterable … to thwart them, to shortcut them, to circumvent them, to cozen, to deny, to scorn, to violate them, is folly such as man’s conceit alone makes possible. … Arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws … that govern the existence of political entities [pp. 76, 77]. Laws that govern the militancy of a people are not of man’s framing, but follow the primitive ordinances of nature that govern all forms of life, from simple protozoa, awash in the sea, to the empires of man.69
I have already indicated the grave misconception which lies at the bottom of the interpretation of the evolutionary law here indicated. What we are concerned with now is to deal with the facts on which this alleged general principle is inductively based. We have seen from the foregoing chapter that man’s nature certainly does change; the next step is to show, from the facts of the present-day world, that the warlike qualities do not make for survival, that the warlike nations do not inherit the earth.
Which are the military nations? We generally
