CHAPTER 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 (