WAR CLAIMS THE BEST

Star (Christchurch), Issue 1125, 19 December 1914, Page 1

WAR CLAIMS THE BEST

AND LEATES THE UNFIT.

AN INTEREST KG-SIIDY.

Dr J. A. Macdonald; editor of the Toronto "Globe," discusses in a notable leading article how war takes the best, of tbe human breed, and leaves weaklings.to breed after their kind for the next generation.; He says: "The biological, law, by which the race is developed and 'real civilisation' advanced through natural selection and the survival of the fittest.in the struggle for existence—that law is reversed in war. "War's call is: 'Semi us the best, you -breed.!-". - chosen firs't,. nnd are first itttcfalfew The. fittest stand ifi the forefront, "and "do not survive.' War's reversed selection makes, for the survival of the unfit. The law works both ways. By it the nation climbs through breeding from its fit; by it the nation sinks by breeding from its I unfit. This is the desolation war works I in tbe human breed. The fittest do not survive, WAR AND THE HUMAN BREED. "" Two newspaper paragraphs should be read together. One'paragraph tells of the recruiting in Scotland of Loi*d Kitchener's army. More than }W"' enlisted in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Ayr; Lord Loval is rallying his clansmen to the Highland Mounted Brigade: Lochiel 'will command a thousand Cameron Highlanders ; almost the entire male population is enlisted from many of the glens and islands; ' scarcely _ a man of war age will be left on Lewis. ; "Next morning early we hear the clatter of hoofs, the rattle of wheels, and the cheering of many voices, and the Glenurquhart men drive past us on their way to Beaufort—outwardly, at least, all smiles and merriment. The bagpipes play mournfully the appropriate . tune' ' Leaving Glenurquhart.' Someone .says in Gaelic 'The Scots are to be sent to Belgium/ and like fire on the heather the news spreads— Johnnie and Alec and Donald are going to Belgium!' A BIOLOGICAL LIE. "The other despatch quotes a statement of Bernhardt, the German military expert, whoso book ' Germany and the; Next War,' • and his more recent publication, now translated into English, i ' On War of To-day,' present the plain, ! unvarnished philosophy of ■ militarism i not in Germany alone, but in France and Britain and America. Berdhardi says: " ' War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it • an unhealthy development /rill follow, which' excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilisation.' "'Biological,' forsooth! Let Scotland answer. Let Germany answer. Never since the d?.yr, of the Stuarts has Scotland, and especially the- Scottish Highlands, beer free from the toll taken uy

.the- recruiting sergeants for Britain's army. The .'"'story of the Celts is, in one sentence: for ever they went out to battle, aiu. xor ever they fell.' The clan followed its chief; the chiefs followed their King, then their Stuart Prince,

and now their British King. 1/ war is a ' hiolof ieal necessity,' what hie, what virility,'what a race of giants the moors and glens mint yield to-day !" ' WHAT GERMANY WILL LOSE | "In more than' forty years Germany has had no war. In the struggle ror ex'stenco the German Empire has .< evoloped in tho ' survivals' not of war but of peace. In their industrial competitions of peace -tho' strongest have survived and the weakest have pone to the wall. Now that they have for tho first time entered the struggle of war—all their physical fit, more than 6.000.000 of "the best they breed—what will be -the answer of the next generation of "Germans? Will the blood poured out in such wild prodigality m the valleys of Franc/?., and the blood that will vet soak like red rain the fond? frofn France over the west to Berlin, and from Russia to Berlin on tho east—will that, waste of Germany's best blod make for the b : ological betterment, of the German nation?'' SCOTLAND SPEAKS. • "Scotland- speaks from long and sad " experience. Every heathery hill looks down on a glen that, generation after generation, sent in answer to the fiery cross and pipes of war the bast its homes had bred." On those moors and through those intervales life st best was hard. The weaklings died in infancy. By the law of the survival of the fittest there was bred a race of' gitints whose kilted regiments, every man of them six feet or more, the pvido of their race and the. glory of' British arms. "Vfhat now says I>iolowy?- Whnt has been the biological issue for Scotland? , * THE HIGHLAND CLANS. j "In the awful days of the Forty-' five, out of this very Glenurquhart 800 men of the clansmen's mould marched to Ciillodeu for their ' Bonnie Prince Charlie,' but a fortnight ago among those who marched out to 'Leaving ,Glenurquhart,' not a"corporal's guard, though they took their best froin Loch Ness '■.- to Corrimony, could pass ihe heroic standard of the olden, days. Grants" from that glen -l'vl from Strathspey stained with their blood, the marble palaces of India, and saved the honour of humanity in the j awful days of the Mutiny; but to-day few of their clan are left 'in their ain dear glen.' The, sturdy Chisholms are gone from Strathglass. Wild and high, as through Be'gium to Waterloo a hundred years ago, the 'Cameron's Gath- | ering' rose' this'"very month when Lochiel called for his men, but how! many had the ' biological' excellence of the clan ' what time the plaided chiefs came down to battle with Montrose?' The Mackenzies to-day are few at Lochr broom. "In the gloaming glens of the "West Highlands there is silence deep as

death where once a thousand. Camp-J bells would start up in a night at the. call of Argyll. No Lord of-the Isles who sleeps in lona could ever again] gather- a clan worthy his tartan, | though he blew all night on. thepibrocfi of Donald. THE PHANTOM HOST. ' "They went out, those Highland clans,, wherever the Royal Standard flew, Again those Highland clans go out, 'the best and breed,-and - they never coihe back. "BjoIpgjr. does the rest. Bernhardi'g 'biological necessity' accomplishes _ its work. War's commercial dislocations and war's financial ruin are bad enough, but war's biological reaction is damage beyond repair. Its waste in blood, its waste' in human protoplasm, its incalculable waste before their time of whole generations of unborn sons of heroic sires—that waste, unreckoned and prodigal, can never be gathered up again. Ir biology means anything, if" blood tells, .then the wholesale slaughter of youth and vigour inHhe trenches and on the wide ' human abattoir' of Europe is loss that has no gain to match. And the loss is not alone of the stalwarts'in their teens and twenties and thirties.

" There is a never-ending phantom host who ought to have been but never shall be—the unborn sons of soldier fathers who faced war's ' biological necessity.' " The weaklings survive, the cotrards escape, the physically unfit are not called, the morally uncourageous are left to breed after their kind for the next generation; but the strong, the daring, the willing—they leave no breed behind. That is loss beyond repair." .