Platitude, of course, but if true, why ignored? Why cannot our military advisers learn, in this respect, from the Navy? Owing to the very nature of the sea as compared with the land, in relation to the merely physical capacities of man, a Navy must be more intelligent than an Army, just as it requires more intelligence to make a boat than to walk; and it is in the Navy that the mechanical factor has been most completely transferred, so that the human machinery is at a discount and the steel machinery made by the human mind is much, whilst the value of the psychical in all its aspects dominates and controls the whole. Great Britain, as the foremost naval power in the world, should long ago have left to its ultimate fate amongst other nations the idea that quantity--so many tons of soldiers and so many tons of sailors--affords an estimate of the warring force of a nation: even if the whole history of this little isle and the possession of our present Empire did not teach, as the history of Rome taught and as the history of Athens teaches in another sphere, that not mass but mind makes a nation great. CHAPTER VII HEREDITY AND RACE-CULTURE “We cannot but feel that the application of biological results is _only beginning_, and beginning with a tardiness which is a reproach to human foresight. There can be no doubt that it would pay the British nation to put aside a million a year for research on eugenics, or the improvement of the human breed.” (Prof. J. A. Thomson, _Heredity_, 1908.) It is evident that the facts and principles of heredity lie at the very basis of eugenics or race-culture in any of its forms, practical or impractical, scientific or unscientific. Our continual assumption throughout is that _like tends to beget like_, and it is on this ground that we desire to make parenthood the privilege of those whom we regard as _inherently_ the best. If there were no such thing as heredity there could be no possibility of race-culture--nor indeed should we be here to discuss it. If a man's children were equally likely to be acorns or babies or tadpoles, the living world would not be the living world we know.