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