Furthermore, the mingling of races and peoples has in all times served greatly to spread knowledge of one another, and they have always profited largely from the mingled knowledge. Soldiers visiting distant lands have brought home acquaintance with new arts and sciences and broader ideas of international usefulness. The soldiers of the North, who marched with Sherman through Georgia to the sea, returned years afterward and built cotton mills, iron foundries, and machine-shops all over the South, and stimulated the South with Northern energy and Northern capital.
We know that the inhabitants of the earth are constantly growing more fit; consequently, we know that they cannot be growing constantly more unfit, due to the degenerative influence of war. The history of nations is a history of wars; consequently we know as untrue the contention of the peace sophists that war secures the survival of the unfit. We know that exactly the opposite must be true; that war secures the survival of the fit.
There is yet another thing of which the peace sophists have never thought, and could not be expected to think—the tremendous self-saving potentiality of the race.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Nature seems to care little for individuals, but everything for a race or species; consequently, Nature has forefended herself by very ample measures to insure the survival of the fit.
If every able-bodied man in the world today were to be slain, and only the weak and puny left, although the injury would be incalculable and would make the whole race stagger, still the next generation of men would be almost as able-bodied and as fit as the present generation. Let us see why: It is because of that great potentiality—atavism. Children inherit not only directly from their parents, but their inheritance harks back to grandfather, great-grandfather, and even to remote ancestry.
Just as a stream of water burdened with impurities is self-purifying when it suns itself on the bright pebbles and on grass and moss that web and tangle it, so life is self-purifying and self-regenerative. Nature is constantly reaching higher and higher. The acquired characteristics of parents tend to become instinctive in their children. Instinct is largely inherited experience.
Nature strives to protect herself against degeneracy. Though bad conduct on the part of parents harmfully affects the child, yet such influences are less potent than those that are regenerative. If this were not true, Nature's ends would not be so well secured.
There is in all animal organisms a certain innate power of resistance to germs of disease, and there is likewise in man a similar power of resistance to degeneracy.
The forces that operate to protect the individual operate also to shield the species by affording protection against evil inheritance.
Abnormal types are not always representative of diseased or degenerate conditions; other considerations must be weighed. Even some criminals may be atavic examples of a class of individuals who were better suited to live under the savage conditions that existed many generations ago.