But the most immediately dangerous result of political ‘Darwinism’ was not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the ’struggle for life’ could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty.  Lord Ampthill, for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day:  ’From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities, and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle of empires.’[114]

[114] Times, Jan. 22, 1908.

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government with a German statesman like Prince Buellow, who seems to combine the teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national conduct.

Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the ‘struggle for life’ among individuals with that which is to be expected from a ‘struggle of empires’ is, of course, thoroughly unscientific.  The ‘struggle of empires’ must either be fought out between European troops alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European allies and subjects.  If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is ‘higher’ than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act of biological retrogression.  Even if the non-European races are brought in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological loss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ individuals will only be slightly diminished.

Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that the evolutionary advantage to be expected from the ‘struggle of empires’ is the ‘survival’ not of races but of political and cultural types.  Our victory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of political liberty.  This argument, which, when urged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires the assumption that types of culture are in the modern world most successfully spread by military occupation.  But in the ancient world Greek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire; Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as an independent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia or France; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from Japan than from England.