me. As
these are killed or disabled, governments draw on the older men who
are still vigorous and hardy. Then finally they call out the unfit,
the sickly, the weak, the aged, and the young boys. As a general rule,
the members of this last class make up the bulk of the men who survive
the war. They, instead of the strong and healthy, become the fathers
of the next generation of children.

In the days of the Roman republic, 220 years B.C., there stood on the
coast of North Africa a city named Carthage, which, like Rome, owned
lands far and near. Carthage would have been satisfied to "live and
let live," but Rome would not have it so. As a result, the two cities
engaged in three terrible wars which ended in the destruction of
Carthage. But before Carthage was finally blotted off the map, her
great general, Hannibal, dealt Rome a blow which brought her to her
knees, and came very near destroying her completely. Five Roman
armies, averaging 30,000 men apiece, he trapped and slaughtered. The
death of these 150,000 men was a loss from which Rome never recovered.
From this time on, her citizens were made of poorer stuff, and the old
Roman courage and Roman honor and Roman free government began to
decline.

The Germanic tribes (the Goths, Franks, Lombards, etc.) who swarmed
into the Roman Empire about the year 400 A.D., although they were
barbarians, nevertheless had many excellent qualities. They were
brave, hardy men and stood for freedom from tyrants. However, they
fought so many wars that they were gradually killed off. Take the
Franks, for example; the three grandsons of Charlemagne, who had
divided up his great empire, fought a disastrous war with one another,
which ended in a great battle that almost wiped out the Frankish
nation. This happened about 840 A.D.

Sweden was once one of the great powers of Europe. However, about 1700
A.D., she had a king named Charles XII, who tried to conquer Russia
and Poland. He was finally defeated at a little town in the southern
part of Russia nearly a thousand miles away from home, and his great
army was wiped out. After his time, Sweden sank to the level of a
second class nation. The bodies of her best men had been strewn on
battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.

[Illustration: Charles XII of Sweden]

For eighty years after the time of Napoleon, the French nation showed
a lower birth rate and produced smaller and weaker men than it had one
hundred yea