University of Virginia Library

ADDRESS BY THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR

Sir Auckland Geddes, LL.D.

It is a great personal pleasure to me to be here to-day but it is a greater
pleasure that I should be privileged to attend your celebrations as the
representative of the British peoples and to be able to convey to you the
congratulations upon the great work which this University has performed
and is performing, as well as to express to you in words, I fear inadequate,
their sentiments of friendship and good will.

To this day as in the days of Queen Elizabeth, the word "Virginia"
stirs in the mind of the British a feeling hard in detail to define but not less
real, not less cordial, because of that difficulty. In that feeling there is
something perhaps of the spirit and mystery of adventure, something of the
idea of high-born lineage and courtly grace, something born of experience,
of the confident expectation of beauty, something of gallantry, something of
bravery, courage, loyalty and service. For reasons hard in detail to analyze
but at their spring perhaps connected with the ancient loyalty and affection
for a great Queen and the tradition of what she and the men of her spacious
days stand for in Britain's story, but added to and reinforced by the countless
tributaries of history and the record of your achievements, Virginia
and all that is hers holds in British minds and British affections a place
apart among the States of this Republic.

I know that I no more than voice the feelings of the people it is my high
privilege to represent when I say that they are with you in sympathy and
spirit to-day and throughout these days when you celebrate the completion
of a hundred years of your University life. I wish that they could have been
with me here now, to see with their own eyes the beauty and grace of your
buildings, to feel in their own souls the pulse of your academic life. That
cannot be; still it is they that extend to you through me their warmest
greetings.

Though the younger universities do not know it and by a merciful
provision of Providence cannot know it, no university comes of age and
enters into its manhood until it reaches the dawn of its second century of

The President of the University Introducing the British Ambassador

existence. It takes time for the soul of a university to evolve. Born of
many men's minds and aspirations it is at first too fluttering, too tender a
thing to hold its way untrammelled and unafraid amid the difficulties and
influences which beset it. In its early days the strong man can make or
mar the university, in its manhood the soul of the university makes or mars
the strongest man that enters its portals as a pilgrim seeking truth. Some
universities, and you are among their number, have been fortunate in that
the strong men of their beginning used their minds and souls to make not to
mar the university, but that impulse would not have persisted powerful and
effective as it has if it had not been reinforced by the minds of a generation
that again knew suffering and sacrifice, high endeavor and the glory of faithfulness
to the end. War is in itself bad, but from its badness there may flow
this good, that lessons which in any event life will teach may be learned
sooner and more clearly and may be applied by young men who can do what
old men cannot hope to perform.

Once again the world has passed through the furnace of war, once again
the horror of the battlefield, made more horrible by science, has bitten deep
into the minds of the nations. Once again for a time they yearn for peace
but as ever, the human mind is forgetful of horror. Already the memories
of the beastliness of war grow dim and the recollections of the fellowship,
the courage, the glories of the human spirit rising triumphant above the
terrors of the body, grow bright and brighter. Our minds are straying back
to the old circular path that leads men to speak of the honor of war and then
of its glory and just before they again know its horror, of its desirability.

To you as to all universities that have achieved manhood, there falls
the duty of preparing your sons to face the problems of the world, not according
to the individual fancies of a man or a small group of men, but according
to the knowledge and the experience that have made the soul of your University.
You have known war and its horrors. You have seen your sons
march out strong and lusty. You have mourned and glorified those that fell,
but mourning and glorifying you have known the pity of the mourning and
the tragedy of the glorification. I know that the hour may come to any
nation as to any individual when he has to fight or die, perhaps fight and die.
But I also know that not in every war fought by every nation was that the
choice. There have been unnecessary wars. There will be so again, unless
you and those like you who are responsible for the thought habit of your
sons consciously and actively strive to set within their minds an understanding
of peace, conceived not as the absence of war, but truthfully as the
joyful acceptation of the reign of law. I am often asked why should the
universities concern themselves actively with the problems of peace. My
answer is that they are concerned with placing truth before the minds of
their children and that the true facts of national life clamor aloud for peace.

Here let me interpolate one remark. I have noticed that when I, as
British Ambassador, speak of Peace I am usually supposed by some newspaper
reporter to dread the immediate or early outbreak of war between
your Nation and mine. May I say that I am not so silly. The continuance
indefinitely into the future of peace between our peoples is so obvious a
necessity of our national lives that I do not dream of the contingency of its
rupture. What I am concerned with is something that seems to me far
greater and far nobler. I wish to see the English-speaking peoples of the
world banded together; in leadership of all the nations, to the era of world
peace and, as a first step, to the era in which the wars which even now we
can recognize as futile and unnecessary, are done with for ever.

I do not wish at this time to speak so much of the higher motives that
impel to peace. I have spoken of them before and others more able than I
have poured forth their eloquence to raise man's mind to a contemplation
of their excellence. I abate no jot or tittle of what I have said in the past
but abating nothing I think it no derogation to speak of the gross folly of
war and to beg of this great University that it will see that its sons and
daughters, ere they go forth to their appointed places in the higher or the
subordinate leadership of their nation know clearly what is the cost of war.

That phrase that I have just used "the cost of war" connotes something
much more than the expenditure of money and the loss of trade. It
connotes mental costs and physical costs hard to be borne by the warring
generations. It also connotes burdens on their posterity that are grievous
to bear but often overlooked. It was your own Benjamin Franklin who said:
"Wars are not paid for in war time; the bill comes later." That is profoundly
true and the bill that comes in is a bill for national vigour and
physique, for health and strength and the happiness that is the portion of
the hale and hearty.

Many have believed that there is good in war—that it toughens the
natural fibre and purges the body politic of slothful ease. My fellow countryman
Ruskin it was who taught that war was a stimulant and "the foundation
of all the high virtues and faculties of men." The best answer to that
false doctrine known to me is that of an American, Professor Starr Jordan,
when he roundly declares that there is precisely as much reason for and
sense in the assertion that fire "is the builder of the forest" since "only in
the flame of destruction do we realize the warmth and strength that lie in
the heart of oak." That expresses exactly what war does. It burns up stores
of good will, of high resolve, of unselfish impulse not only, it also burns up
the physical strength and fitness of the people.

The biological effect of war upon a people is a subject of study that
surpasses in interest and I believe in ultimate importance the whole of war's
economic effects which are themselves of such interest and importance.

There is of course close connection and much action and reaction between
the two, still they are in reality as sharply defined the one from the other, as
are the problems of the mental and moral effects of war from either.

Let us look for a few moments at this biological problem and as preliminary
let me recall to your minds three biological laws:—The first, that
any pair male and female, human, animal or vegetable, which are themselves
of the same kind, tend to have, that is on the average do have, offspring like
unto themselves. That is, like tends to beget like; the second, the law of
filial regression formulated by Galton which I shall enter into a little more
fully in a moment, and the third, that any race of living things can be
modified in either direction by stringent selection to the limits of the normal
variation of the race and can with certainty be maintained at that level so
long as the stringency of selection is maintained.

I spoke a moment ago of the law of filial regression. It is a statistical
generalization which is certainly true when large numbers of living things
of one kind are considered. It has no bearing on and cannot be used for
prognostigation in individual cases. It is known to be true for the inheritance
by human beings of stature, arm span, eye color and mental faculties
but to apply it, it has to be assumed that the people under examination have
been made homogeneous by intermarriage. Put very simply it reads that
the children of unusual parents will be less unusual than their parents. For
example, if the parents are unusually tall or short the children will be less
unusually tall or short; in other words, the children digress towards the level
of mediocrity which is the level of their average ancestor. Consider the
ancestors you must have had twenty-five generations ago if in your family
trees there is no intermarriage of cousins within the 25th degree of consanguinity.
Two parents, four grandparents and so on gives sixteen million
great great ancestors at or about 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest of
England. To find anything like a fifth of that number we who are of blood
drawn from the British Isles would have to derive something in our origin
alike from kings and haughty peers, from pot boys and kitchen maids, from
the houses of the religious, from the stews and sinks of the medieval cities.
Similarly for all others of European stock. We are all without exception the
descendants of an absolutely average ancestral pair, average in their physique,
their manners, their morals and their customs and it is toward this
average man and woman that the children of the unusual tend to regress.

Many who meet with the law of Filial Regression for the first time find
difficulty in understanding how, if it be true, the whole population is not of
precisely the same height and intelligence. As a matter of fact it does not
even suggest that the population should be uniform. It merely indicates
that in a homogeneous population, favorable variations, for example good
stature or intelligence, are not to be looked for in any special social clique

or class but may occur anywhere over the whole range of the homogeneous
population. But though this is true it does not mean that the children of
the good stocks and the children of the bad will be on the average of equal
excellence or worthlessness. The children of the gifted members of a poor
stock may be individually equal to the children of two poor members of a
gifted stock, but of the children's children those of the former will tend to
regress to the mean of their stock, that is to be less gifted, whereas those of
the latter will tend to regress to the mean of their stock, that is to be more
gifted. The reason for this is that the nearer the ancestor the more he or she
contributes on the average to the total of an individual's characteristics.
The statistically determined proportion gives the parents one half of the
total heritage of an individual, the four grandparents, one quarter, the eight
grandparents, one eighth and so on. All this simply means that though the
sons of short men may be tall and the sons of stupid men clever, the average
grandchild will be short or stupid, though less short or less stupid than their
grandparents were, whereas the sons of tall men may be short and of clever
men stupid, yet the grandchildren will pull up the average again, though
they will not be so exceptional as their grandparents.

Now to gain a good idea of the effect that war will have on the physical
and mental attributes of a population all that the biologist needs to know
besides these laws is, how are the national armies raised, what are their
casualties, and over what period were they spread. Does the whole manhood
of the nation of certain ages fight regardless of physique, intelligence or
of any other quality—or is there some form of selection? Are some of the
men of military age taken and others left? Or are some of the men put into
fighting units and others into noncombatant on some basis of selection
other than pure chance?

So far we have considered a homogeneous population involved in war.
What if it be heterogeneous? Does it for example consist of two races;
one in reality ruling, the other in reality subject? Or is the population
broken up into strata, degenerates in the slums of great cities, stunted clerks
and healthy countrymen? Or is there a great class cleavage on the one side
of which there is light and air and freedom to grow and develop, on the other
insufficient clothing, early toil, lack of food, filth and squalor. Then the
questions are:

How from such a population is the army raised? In the one case does
the ruling caste take the burden of warfare on its own shoulders, in the
others is there selective conscription, real universal service, or is there a small
standing army recruited voluntarily and depending for its expansion in time
of war on the patriotism of volunteers?

Obviously in an address of this character I cannot deal with each of
these possibilities of military and national organization. Let us take one or

The British Ambassador Speaking in the Amphitheatre

two examples and examine them. Let us consider first the nation in which
there is a ruling caste which perforce assumes the burden of warfare and see
what happens in an extreme case.

Generation by generation let us suppose the healthy virile men are
required for the army and leave a proportion of their numbers upon the
battlefields. When a young healthy man dies the nation loses not only an
individual but a potential line of healthy men, for each is, in posse, the
founder of a virile stock. True these soldier men may leave descendants but
many of them will not be in the old homesteads. Too often a majority of
their offspring are found on the frontiers of their nation, learning an alien
mother's tongue and hatreds and an alien mother's creed. The true sons of a
ruling caste are often taught to be its bitterest foes, while in the old homesteads
those unfit for the army rule in their dead brothers' places and father
the next generation. By the law of filial regression their sons will be more fit
than they and these will be the recruits of the next generation and their less
fit brothers the fathers of the one to follow. So on the process goes from
generation to generation, the average ancestor tumbling down and down
the physical scale until in the end defeat and destruction overtake the
nation.

Rome is the great historical example of the Empire that fell because its
ruling caste was wasted in war. For centuries she relied upon the healthy
yeoman farmers of the Apennines to form the backbone of her army but she
squandered her capital of manhood. Professor Seechs calculates that "Out
of every hundred thousand of her strong men, eighty thousand were slain;
out of every hundred thousand of her weaklings ninety to ninety-five thousand
were left to survive." Even if these figures be only approximately
correct, they show how war wore out Rome, not so much economically as in
physical strength and energy. She debased her average ancestor and forced
the law of filial regression to work against her. But you may say, that is old
and long ago and far away. As a matter of fact biologically it is fairly recent,
but here is another example more recent still. France in the days of Napoleon
raised her armies by conscription with a special eye on the tall men
whom she required to fill the regiments of the guard. Napoleon as we all
know was a great general; his victories cost France two million lives. Those
gallant Frenchmen died practically without issue in French homes and they
were the best, the tallest, the straightest that France could bring. The result
was that the average Frenchman of 1910 was two inches shorter in stature
than the average Frenchman of 1810. Doubtless the law of filial regression
was carrying French stature back to its old mean but the time was short
and the less fit ancestors of a hundred years ago were too much in the foreground
for much of the loss to have made up. I speak only of stature but
doubtless there were other losses not dissimilar in kind in those that Rome

suffered. We know how numerically stagnant France's population was
when this century opened. That was to be expected. And France has
again been bled white. It is too soon to say what the biological effects
of that will be, but that years are necessary to her biological recovery is
certain.

Time forbids that I go on with these examples. My point is this:
"War has to be paid for in physical ill-being through generation after generation."
Nations cannot squander their best and maintain the standard
of their stock. Children tend to be like the parents that the nation lets
them have; generation after generation the stock may try to get back to its
ancestral type but the stringent selection of war such as Rome used will in
the end hold the population at the level to which selection modifies it.

Nor need we fear that peace will rot the vitals of a nation. After two
centuries in which she knew no war Japan proved her courage on the battlefields
of Manchuria. That is what we should expect. As Professor Starr
Jordan has well said: "In time of peace there is no slaughter of the strong,
no sacrifice of the courageous. In the peaceful struggle for existence there
is a premium placed on the virtues. The virile and the brave survive; the
idle weak and dissipated go to the wall." It is the selection of peace not the
selection of war that makes a national stock grow strong.

I have left on one side the economic effects of war, more intense to-day
as the result of the industrialization of the nations than ever before. I have
not spoken of the shattered towns and broken cities, the ruined mills, the
flooded pits. I have said nothing of the moral and mental devastation that
war causes. Of these I have not spoken nor of the outrage that war is to all
that is best within our souls. The indictment against war can be made so
strong that none who is not perverse and foolish can gainsay it. I believe
most profoundly that it is the duty of every university to plant, in the minds
of its intellectual children, a true understanding of the cost of war so that
never light-heartedly will they let their nation turn to the dread arbitrament
of arms. I have acknowledged that in the world as it is, the choice for a
nation may be to fight or die but I believe that now is the time for the
English-speaking peoples with their great and peculiar advantages to resolve,
that never again will they permit this fair world to be devastated by unnecessary
war if by standing firmly together they can prevent it.

What is to hinder their coöperation to this great end? Nothing that I
know of but ignorance of each other's ideals and aspirations and the suspicion
that is the child of ignorance.

May I say this to you the University of Virginia—Great is your record
and great are your achievements. Add blessedness to your greatness and
send forth your sons and daughters burning with a high resolve to be numbered
among the Peacemakers.

Introducing the next speaker, the President of the University said:

The finest thing any University can do in this world is to train a man
who seeks the truth and finds it and makes it known to his fellows. We call
such a man a scholar. Our next speaker is such a scholar who has enlarged
the boundaries of knowledge in his field, given his spirit unselfishly to youth
and served his country with fidelity and devotion.

I present John Bassett Moore, Class of '80, Professor of International
Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University.