to simplify the issue and line out the thing with knife-like
cuts.

The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must
develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in
war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the
interests of more capable people. It must foster and accelerate that
natural segregation, which has been discussed in the third and fourth
chapters of these "Anticipations," or perish. The war of the coming time
will really be won in schools and colleges and universities, wherever
men write and read and talk together. The nation that produces in the
near future the largest proportional development of educated and
intelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters,
professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts;
the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes,
exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds
most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes
that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions,
death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish
incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the
nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its
irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the nation
that will be the most powerful in warfare as in peace, will certainly be
the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000. In the long run
no heroism and no accidents can alter that. No flag-waving, no
patriotic leagues, no visiting of essentially petty imperial personages
hither and thither, no smashing of the windows of outspoken people nor
seizures of papers and books, will arrest the march of national defeat.
And this issue is already so plain and simple, the alternatives are
becoming so pitilessly clear, that even in the stupidest court and the
stupidest constituencies, it must presently begin in some dim way to be
felt. A time will come when so many people will see this issue clearly
that it will gravely affect political and social life. The patriotic
party--the particular gang, that is, of lawyers, brewers, landlords, and
railway directors that wishes to be dominant--will be forced to become
an efficient party in profession at least, will be forced to stimulate
and organize that educational and social development that may at last
even bring patriot