The Human Drift | Page 2

discovered fire or manufactured for himself religion. And to this day,
his finest creative energy and technical skill are devoted to the same old
task of making better and ever better killing weapons. All his days,
down all the past, have been spent in killing. And from the fear-stricken,
jungle- lurking, cave-haunting creature of long ago, he won to empery
over the whole animal world because he developed into the most
terrible and awful killer of all the animals. He found himself crowded.

He killed to make room, and as he made room ever he increased and
found himself crowded, and ever he went on killing to make more
room. Like a settler clearing land of its weeds and forest bushes in
order to plant corn, so man was compelled to clear all manner of life
away in order to plant himself. And, sword in hand, he has literally
hewn his way through the vast masses of life that occupied the earth
space he coveted for himself. And ever he has carried the battle wider
and wider, until to-day not only is he a far more capable killer of men
and animals than ever before, but he has pressed the battle home to the
infinite and invisible hosts of menacing lives in the world of
micro-organisms.
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.
And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword. Flood,
famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducing
population--in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his
"Expansion of Races," has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the
Yellow River burst, 7,000,000 people were drowned. The failure of
crops in Ireland, in 1848, caused 1,000,000 deaths. The famines in
India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900 lessened the population by 21,000,000.
The T'ai'ping rebellion and the Mohammedan rebellion, combined with
the famine of 1877-78, destroyed scores of millions of Chinese. Europe
has been swept repeatedly by great plagues. In India, for the period of
1903 to 1907, the plague deaths averaged between one and two
millions a