In all these and the like cases there has been a process of selective breeding, eliminating the soldierly stocks and leaving the others to breed the race.
The men who so loved fighting that they fought till they died had few chances of propagating their own warlike impulses. The men who fought and ran away, the men who never fought at all, were the men who created the new generation and transmitted to it their own traditions.
This selective process, moreover, has not merely acted automatically; it has been furthered by social opinion and social pressure, sometimes very drastically expressed. Thus in the England of the Plantagenets there grew up a class called "gentlemen"—not, as has sometimes been supposed, a definitely defined class, though they were originally of good birth—whose chief characteristic was that they were good fighting men, and sought fortune by fighting. The "premier gentleman" of England,