r have been carried very far in the stock from which
man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two
somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive
activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken
rise.

The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on
war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or
the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection--that
war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races,
the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be
examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in
connection with the present war. This biological theory or apology of
war appears in several forms, as applied to-day. They say that racial
stocks contend with one another for existence, and with this goes the
belief that nations fight for life, and that defeat in war tends
towards the extermination of nations. The Germans, we often hear, were
fighting for national existence, and the issue was to be a judgment
upon the fitness of their race to survive. This view is very often
expressed. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, for example, say
that the same aggressive motives prevail as always in warfare: nations
struggle for survival, and this struggle for survival must now and
again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight
for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts
have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder,
and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the
part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially
increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that
absolute hostility is a law of nature in the world.

These views contain at least two very doubtful assumptions. One is
that nations do actually fight for existence,--that warfare is thus
selective to the point of eliminating races. The other is that in
warlike conflicts the victors are the superior peoples, the better
fitted for survival. Confusion arises and the discussion is
complicated by the fact that conflicts of men as groups of individuals
within the same species are somewhat anomalous among biological forms
of struggle. Commonly, struggle takes place among individuals,
organisms having definite characteristics and but slightly variable
each from its own kind contending