ncy
success in modern warfare largely rests.

The creation of the National Army in the United States, in 1917, while
in most ways admirably conducted, was open to criticism in several
respects, from the eugenic point of view:

(a) Too many college men and men in intellectual pursuits were taken as
officers, particularly in the aviation corps. There should have been
more men employed as officers who had demonstrated the necessary
qualifications, as foremen and others accustomed to boss gangs of men.

(b) The burden was thrown too heavily on the old white Americans, by the
exemption of aliens, who make up a large part of the population in some
states. There were communities in New England which actually could not
fill their quotas, even by taking every acceptable native-born resident,
so large is their alien population. The quota should have been adjusted
if aliens were to be exempt.

(c) The district boards were not as liberal as was desirable, in
exempting from the first quota men needed in skilled work at home. The
spirit of the _selective_ draft was widely violated, and necessitated a
complete change of method before the second quota was called by the much
improved questionnaire method.

It is difficult to get such mistakes as these corrected; nevertheless a
nation should never lose sight of the fact that war is inevitably
damaging, and that the most successful nation is the one which wins its
wars with the least possible eugenic loss.

Leaving the period of preparedness, we consider the period of open
warfare. The reader will remember that, in an earlier chapter, we
divided natural selection into (1) lethal, that which operates through
differential mortality; (2) sexual, that which operates through
differential mating; and (3) fecundal, that which operates through
differential fecundity. Again, selection operates both in an inter-group
competition and an intra-group competition. The influence of any agency
on natural selection must be examined under each of these six heads. In
the case of war, however, fecundal selection may be eliminated, as it is
little influenced. Still another division arises from the fact that the
action of selection is different during war upon the armed forces
themselves and upon the population at home; and after the war, upon the
nations with the various modifications that the war has left.

We will consider lethal selection first. To measure the effect of the
inter-group selection of