It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the sword.  And yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose by the sword than perished by it, else man would not to-day be over-running the world in such huge swarms.  Also, it must not be forgotten that they who did not rise by the sword did not rise at all.  They were not.  In view of this, there is something wrong with Doctor Jordan’s war-theory, which is to the effect that the best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men who are left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore, the human race deteriorates under war.  If this be so, if we have sent forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were left, and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and are what we splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid and god-like beings must have been our forebears those ten thousand millenniums ago!  Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan’s theory, those ancient forebears cannot live up to this fine reputation.  We know them for what they were, and before the monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints and resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago.  And by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the planet, those ape-like creatures have developed even into you and me.  As Henley has said in “The Song of the Sword”: 

   “The Sword Singing—­

   Driving the darkness,
   Even as the banners
   And spear of the Morning;
   Sifting the nations,
   The Slag from the metal,
   The waste and the weak
   From the fit and the strong;
   Fighting the brute,
   The abysmal Fecundity;
   Checking the gross
   Multitudinous blunders,
   The groping, the purblind
   Excesses in service
   Of the Womb universal,
   The absolute drudge.”

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in search of room.  He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of men became prodigious.  The weak and the decadent fell under the sword.  Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich river deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more capable with the sword.  Unknown and unnumbered billions of men have been so destroyed in prehistoric times.  Draper says that in the twenty years of the Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; “and that the wars, famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the human species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000.”  Germany, in the Thirty Years’ War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants.  The record of our own American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.