English writers to secure the acceptance of this doctrine of force. Many passages almost duplicating those of Bernhardi, or at least extolling the general doctrine of force, may be found in the writings of such Anglo-Saxon authors as Admiral Mahan and Professor Spenser Wilkinson.5
A scientific color is often given to the philosophy of force, as expressed by the authors just referred to, by an appeal to evolutionary and biological laws.
It is urged that the condition of man's advance in the past has been the survival of the fit by struggle and warfare, and that in that struggle it is precisely those endowed with combativeness and readiness to fight who have survived. Thus the tendency to combat is not a mere human perversity, but is part of the self-protective instinct rooted in a profound biological law—the struggle of nations for survival.
This point of view is expressed by S.R. Steinmetz in his "Philosophie des Krieges." War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential function of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues; no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor—there is no moral or intellectual point of superiority that does not tell when "God holds His assizes, and hurls the peoples one upon another" (Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht); and Dr. Steinmetz does not believe that in the long-run chance and luck play any part