selection being rich and varied. Any great reduction in the amount and variety of what is to be regarded as the raw material of elaboration necessarily must have as an infallible effect, the arrest of progress. It may be objected, however, that anything approaching extermination could obviously not be possible in a war between such immense units as those of modern man. Nevertheless, the object of each of the two adversaries would be to impose its will on the other, and to destroy in it all that was especially individual, all the types of activity and capacity which were the most characteristic in its civilization and therefore the cause of hostility. The effect of success in such an endeavour would be an enormous impoverishment of the variety of the race and a corresponding effect on progress.
To this line of speculation it may perhaps further be objected that the question is not of the necessity of war to the race as a whole, but to the individual nation or major unit. The argument has been used that when a nation is obviously the repository of all the highest gifts and tendencies of civilization, the race must in the end benefit, if this nation, by force if necessary, imposes its will and its principles on as much of the world as it can. To the biologist the weakness of this proposition—apart from the plain impossibility of a nation attaining an objective estimate of the value of its own civilization—is that it embodies a course of action which tends to the spread of uniformity and to limit that variety of material which is the fundamental quality essential for progress. In certain cases of very gross discrepancy between the value of two civilizations, it is quite possible that the destruction of the simpler by the more elaborate does not result in any great {130} loss to the race through the suppression of valuable varieties. Even this admission is, however, open to debate, and it may well be doubted whether in some ways the wholesale extermination of “inferior” races has not denied to the species the perpetuation of lines of variation