nation who make it." Therefore, if we want to win and at the same time to avoid being stigmatized as aggressors, we should attack without warning. To sum up, man is a fighting animal in the sense that he is a "scrapping animal." It is for man and man alone to decide whether he shall do his "scrapping" murderously or according to rules which limit the amount of violence used or even, as in the case of non-violent resistance, abolish it altogether. Mass murder is no more a necessity than individual murder. In 1600 duelling must have seemed to many intelligent people a law of nature. But the fact remains that we have abolished duelling. There is no reason why we should not abolish war. Ill At this point the objector appeals to Darwin. "The struggle for existence," he insists, "goes on in the human as well as in the sub-human world. War is the method by which nature selects the fittest human beings." But whom or what does war select for survival? The answer is that, so far as individuals are concerned, it selects women, children, and such men as are too old or infirm to bear arms. The young and the strong, who do the fighting, are eliminated; and the larger the army and the more efficient the weapons, the greater the number of young, strong men who will be killed. War selects dysgenically. The objector now falls back on a second line of defence. War may be a clumsy way of selecting individuals; but its real value lies in its power to select the b@st stocks, governments and cultures. But if we look at the records of history we see that war has done its selection in a very erratic way. Sometimes, it is true, victory in war does unquestionably lead to replacement of the defeated by the victorious stock. But this can happen only when the victors exterminate 6 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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