Abstract
THE Manchester Statistical Society has printed an eloquent address by Dr. C. W. Saleeby, “The Longest Price of War.” The thesis is the old, but politically ignored, result of war in “reversed selection.” Quoting Michelet's epi1gram that the campaigns of Napoleon lopped a cubit from the stature of the French, and Prof. J. A, Thomson's observation that not even the discoveries of Pasteur could restore the physique which the victories of Napoleon's armies had destroyed, Dr. Saleeby notes the small size of the present-day French soldier, as remarked by many observers. To-day, for our own forces, “the brave, the vigorous, the healthy, the patriotic are taken, and the others left. … The rejected recruits recruit the race.” The whole question is one which statisticians should investigate in special reference to the present war. Dr. Starr Jordan's study, “The Human Harvest,” and the late J. Novikow's “Darwinisme Sociale,” are the best of a meagre list of popular expositions of the thesis, of which the decay of the Roman Empire is the classic type. Speeck estimated that of every hundred thousand Romans, eighty thousand were slain. “Vir” thus gave place to “homo”; “the Roman Empire perished,” says Seeley, “for want of men.”
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War and the Race . Nature 94, 544 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/094544b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/094544b0