V.

This thought unearths the lowest root-fallacy of the biological sociology, – the assumption that there is but one sort of national efficiency and that it is tested by a contest of military or commercial power. The only meaning of “social efficiency,” as applied to a nation, is the power which the nation displays of adapting itself to its physical environment and of altering that environment to help the adaptation; the attainments in religion, law, politics, intellectual life and industry are the expressions of this social efficiency. Bearing this in mind, it is evident that for purposes of concrete comparison there are many kinds of social efficiency, and that the notion that civilization is a single beaten track upon which every nation must march, and that social efficiency, or extent of civilization, can be measured by the respective distances the nations have gone, is a mischievous fallacy.

The true social efficiency, or civilization of a nation, shows itself only in its more complex achievements and activities. The biologist who understands his science would recognize that a true test of the efficiency of nations demands that the conflict of nations should take place not by the more primitive forms of fight and the ruder weapons in which nations are less differentiated, but by the higher forms of fight and the more complex intellectual and moral weapons which express the greatest degrees of national differentiation. In a word, we must stop military and commercial warfare between nations, which test very poorly the lowest forms of fitness that are the least characteristic expressions of nationalism, in order that we may substitute the struggle of moral, intellectual and aesthetic ideas and institutions, which best test the higher forms of fitness that are the most characteristic expressions of nationalism. This higher struggle, conducted through reason, is none the less a national struggle for existence because it results in the death of ideas and institutions which are worsted, and not in the death of human organisms. The civilization of the world can proceed upon the higher planes only on condition that this struggle of national ideals and institutions is waged by a free field of competitors; and this struggle cannot be effectively maintained unless the lower military and industrial struggles cease.

Biology always demands as a condition of progress the competition of individuals; but as reason grows in the nation it closes the ring and imposes laws, not to stop the struggle, but to make it a fairer test of a fuller form of individual fitness. Biology demands as a condition of world progress that the struggle of nations or races continue; but as the world grows more rational it will in similar fashion rationalize the rules of that ring, imposing a fairer test of forms of national fitness. The notion of the world as a cockpit of nations, in which round after round shall eliminate feebler fighters and leave in the end one nation “the most efficient” to lord it on the dunghill, has no scientific validity. Invoked to support the claims of militant nationalism, it begins by ignoring the very nature and purposes of national life, assuming that uniformity of character and environment which is the negation of nationalism.

The notion that with the stoppage of war, could it be achieved, national vigor must decay is based on a complete failure to recognize that the lower form of struggle is stopped for the express purpose, and with the necessary result, that the higher struggle shall become possible. With the cessation of war, whatever is really vital and valuable in nationality does not perish; on the contrary, it grows and thrives as it could not do before, when the national spirit out of which it grows was absorbed in baser sorts of struggle. Internationalism is no more opposed to the true purposes of nationalism than socialism within the nation, rightly guided, is hostile to individualism. The problem and its solution are the same. We socialize in order that we may individuate; we cease fighting with bullets in order to fight with ideas. All the essentials of the biological struggle for life are retained, – the incentive to individual vigor, the intensity of the struggle, the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The struggle has become more rational in mode and purpose and results, and reason is only a higher form of nature.

The shortsightedness of the school of biological sociologists is nowhere more strikingly displayed than by the exclusive attention they pay to the simpler form of struggle – the direct conflict of individuals and species – to the exclusion of the important part played by “crossing” as a means of progress throughout organic life. The law of the fertility of “crosses,” as applied to civilization or social efficiency, alike on the physical and on the psychical plane, requires internationalism as a condition of effective operation. It is of course true that throughout history the crossing of national types has been largely achieved by means of war, conquest and subjugation. But this, though subserving progress in the long run, has been a most wasteful, indirect and unsafe method, the selection being determined with no clear view to the future or to any higher purpose of social efficiency. Just in proportion as internationalism promotes free intercourse between nations for higher purposes of peaceful interest, the blending of races by intermarriage will be determined on grounds of affinity more fruitful of improved racial efficiency, and modifications of species more numerous and more novel will compete with one another as factors in the civilization of the world, raising the character and intensity of the competition and enhancing the pace of human progress.

Nay, we may carry the biological analogy still further, following the insistence of Professor Pearson regarding the necessity of bringing direct social pressure, of public opinion or of law, to prevent the fatal process of breeding from “bad stock.” If the ordinary processes of physical degeneracy within the nation do not suffice for the elimination of bad stock, but must be supplemented by some direct prohibition of bad parentage, taking the wider scale of operations it might be necessary in the interests of mankind that similar measures should be enforced by the mandates of organized humanity. As lower individuals perish by contact with a civilization to which they cannot properly assimilate themselves, so lower races in some instances disappear by similar contact with higher races whose diseases and physical vices prove too strong for them. A rational stirpiculture in the wider social interests might require a repression of the spread of degenerate or unprogressive races, corresponding to the check which a nation might place upon the propagation from bad individual stock. With the other moral and practical issues connected with such a proposal we need not here concern ourselves; confining ourselves to the distinctively biological argument, that course would seem to follow from the application of direct rational rejection of bad stock upon the smaller scale of national life. The importance of this consideration rests upon the fact that this rejection of unsound racial stock implies the existence of an international political organization which has put down war and substituted this rational for the cruder natural selection and rejection of races.

Whether a nation or a society of nations will ever proceed as far as this, or, going further, will ever attempt the fuller art of stirpiculture by encouraging useful crosses of families or races, may be matter of grave doubt; but if the maintenance and improvement of the national stock ever warranted such experiments, we are entitled to insist that logic would justify the application of the same rule in the society of nations.

Again, while it is questionable how far the law of the utility of cross fertilization is transferable from the world of physical organisms to the psychical realm in its literal bearing, the more general applicability cannot be disputed. That scientific theories, religious, social and political arts and institutions gain by free friendly vital intercourse with other theories, arts and institutions, undergoing serviceable accretions, excretions and modifications, is a commonplace of intellectual life. Therefore, whether we regard the contact of ideas and feelings and the arts they animate as a direct struggle for existence in which the worse or falser perish and the better and truer survive, or as a friendly intercourse in which each selects and assimilates something from the others, internationalism is as essential to the efficiency of these processes as nationalism itself.

It is only when we realize the true nature of this spread and fertilization of ideas and arts and institutions – the riper fruits of the spirit of a nation – that we realize the legitimate as distinguished from the illegitimate expansion, the valid significance of empire. When nations compete to take one another’s lives or land or trade, the dominion which the conqueror establishes has no element of permanence; another shift of the military or commercial tide sweeps away the victory and leaves scarce a ripple mark in the sands. But the influence exerted through arts of peace is more lasting, more penetrating and more glorious. Shakespeare, Byron, Darwin and Stevenson have done incomparably more for the influence of England in the history of the world than all the statesmen and soldiers who have won victories or annexed new provinces. Macaulay has well said: “There is an empire exempt from all natural sources of decay. That empire is the imperishable empire of our art and our morals, our literature and our law.” The antagonism between imperialism in the extensive sense and this intensive imperialism is not rhetorical; it is grounded upon biological necessities.

The essential conditions of the lower struggle for the life and land and trade of others preclude the higher and more profitable competition of ideas by which the empire of the national mind is extended; it is not merely the economy of energy which determines that the national vigor cannot at the same time engage effectively in both struggles, but, far more important, the very nature of the lower struggle drives each nationality to feed upon itself in insolent and exclusive pride, inhibiting the receptivity of other nations. Effective international government for national and racial selection can alone be regarded as an accurate and economical instrument of world progress. In the cruder form of the struggle for national selection, accident or numbers or some low form of force or cunning may secure the success of a people whose social efficiency is of a low order, impermanent and unprogressive, and may stamp out or check the growth of a people whose latent powers of achievement and capacity for progress are far superior. Only in proportion as racial or national selection is rationally guided and determined does the world gain security against such wastes and such calamities. An international government is required which can furnish adequate protection to weak but valuable nationalities, and can check the insolent brutality of powerful aggressors, preserving that equality of opportunities for national self-expression which is as essential to the commonwealth of nations as to the welfare of the several nations. Only by raising the crude, fragmentary, informal, often insincere beginnings of international government into a stronger, more coherent and more complex authority can the struggle for life proceed upon the highest arena of competition, selecting the finest forms of social efficiency.