Even in the first frenzied hours of August, 1914, wise men realized the horror that stood upon the threshold. The crowd might cheer, but the reflective already mourned in prospect the losses which were in store. As the English writer Harold Begbie then said: "Remember this. Among the young conscript soldiers of Europe who will die in thousands, and perhaps millions, are the very flower of civilization; we shall destroy brains which might have discovered for us in ten or twenty years easements for the worst of human pains and solutions for the worst of social dangers. We shall blot those souls out of our common existence. We shall destroy utterly those splendid burning spirits reaching out to enlighten our darkness. Our fathers destroyed those strange and valuable creatures whom they called 'witches.' We are destroying the brightest of our angels."[102] But it is doubtful if any of these seers realized the full price which the race was destined to pay during more than four long, agonizing years. Never before had war shown itself such an unerring gleaner of the best racial values. As early as the summer of 1915 Mr. Will Irwin, an American war correspondent, remarked the growing convictions among all classes, soldiers as well as civilians, that the war was fatally impoverishing the race. "I have talked," he wrote, "with British officers and British Tommies, with English ladies of fashion and English housewives, with French deputies and French cabmen, and in all minds alike I find the same idea fixed--what is to become of the French race and the British race, yes, and the German race, if this thing keeps up?" Mr. Irwin then goes on to describe the cumulative process by which the fittest were selected--for death. "I take it for granted," he says, "that, in a general way, the bravest are the best, physically and spiritually. Now, in this war of machinery, this meat-mill, it is the bravest who lead the charges and attempt the daring feats, and, correspondingly, the loss is greatest among those bravest. "So much when the army gets into line. But in the conscript countries, like France and Germany, there is a process of selection in picking the army by which the best--speaking in general terms--go out to die, while the weakest remain. The undersized, the undermuscled, the underbrained, the men twisted by hereditary deformity or devitalized by hereditary disease--they remain at home to propagate the breed. The rest--all the rest--go out to take chances. "Furthermore, as modern conscript armies are organized, it is the youngest men who sustain the heaviest losses--the men who are not yet fathers. And from the point of view of the race, that is, perhaps, the most melancholy fact of all.