96 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



women, fit to lead and control the social and political life of the state. 

 In England, the eldest son is chosen for this purpose, a good arrange- 

 ment, according to Samuel Johnson, 'because it ensures only one fool in 

 the family/ For the theory of the leisure class forgets that men are 

 made virile by effort and resistance, and the lord developed by the use 

 of 'royal jelly' has rarely been distinguished by perfection of manhood. 



The gain of primogeniture came in the fact that the younger sons 

 and the daughters' sons were forced constantly back into the mass of 

 the people. Among the people at large this stronger blood became the 

 dominant strain. The Englishmen of to-day are the sons of the old 

 nobility, and in the stress of natural selection they have crowded out 

 the children of the swineherd and the slave. The evil of primogeniture 

 has furnished its own antidote. It has begotten democracy. The 

 younger sons in Cromwell's ranks asked on their battle-flags why the 

 eldest should receive all and they nothing. Richard Eumbold, whom 

 they slew in the Bloody Assizes, "could never believe that Providence 

 had sent into the world a few men already booted and spurred, with 

 countless millions already saddled and bridled for these few to ride." 

 Thus these younger sons became the Roundhead, the Puritan, the Pil- 

 grim. They swelled Cromwell's Army, they knelt at Marston Moor, 

 they manned the Mayflower, and in each generation they have fought 

 for liberty in England and in the United States. Studies in genealogy 

 show that all this is literally true. All the old families in New England 

 and Virginia trace their lines back to nobility, and thence to royalty. 

 Almost every Anglo-American has, if he knew it, noble and royal blood 

 in his veins. The Massachusetts farmer, whose fathers came from Ply- 

 mouth in Devon, has as much of the blood of the Plantagenets, of Wil- 

 liam and of Alfred as flows in any royal veins in Europe. But his an- 

 cestral line passes through the working and fighting younger son, not 

 through him who was first born to the purple. The persistence of the 

 strong shows itself in the prevalence of the leading qualities of her 

 dominant strains of blood, and it is well for England that her gentle 

 blood flows in all her ranks and in all her classes. When we consider 

 with Demolins 'what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon,' we 

 shall find his descent from the old nobility, 'Saxon and Norman and 

 Dane,' not the least of its factors. 



XVI. On the continent of Europe the law of primogeniture existed 

 in less force, and the results were very distinct. All of noble blood 

 were continuously noble. All belonged to the leisure class. All were 

 held on the backs of a third estate, men of weaker heredity, beaten 

 lower into the dust by the weight of an ever-increasing body of nobility. 

 The blood of the strong rarely mingled with that of the clown. The 

 noblemen were brought up in indolence and ineffectiveness. The evils 

 of dissipation wasted their individual lives, while casting an ever-in- 



