THE CAUSE OF CHARACTER. 827 



wealthy citizen, in spite of all my disadvantages, while he, poor idle 

 dog, has never been able to secure as much as a brief, with all his 

 learning ! I'm fifty per cent a better man than he is ! " Vanity of 

 vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. 



The fact is, if we want impartially to discuss this question of char- 

 acters we must each leave our own supernaturally beautiful character 

 out of the queston, and think only of the vastly inferior and ordinary 

 characters of other people. We mustn't even allege striking instances 

 from the history of our sisters, our cousins, and our aunts, because 

 there, on the one hand, our calm sense of the excellence of the stock 

 from which we ourselves are the final flower and topmost out- 

 come is apt to prejudice our better judgment, while on the other hand 

 our natural contempt for the gross shortcomings of our near relations 

 under such closely similar cii'cumstances, when compared with our own 

 virtues and strong points, is liable to beget in us too lordly a supercili- 

 ousness toward their obvious failings. It is best entirely to dismiss from 

 consideration all the persons standing to ourselves within the list of 

 prohibited degrees set forth in the Pi'ayer Book, to abstain from too 

 fond an affection for our grandmother, and to concentrate our attention 

 wholly on the persons of that common vulgar herd of outsiders falling 

 as aforesaid under the contemptible category of other people. 



Examined from this impartial and objective point of view, then, 

 other families beside our own show us at once how much light may be 

 cast upon the origin of character by the study of fathers and mothers, 

 brothers and sisters, first and second cousins, and so forth indefinitely. 

 Mr. Galton's exhaustive paper upon the habits and manners of the 

 common twin is an admirable example of the precise results that may 

 be obtained by such minute and accurate objective study of hereditary 

 peculiarities. For it must always be remembered that two brothers 

 ought by nature to resemble one another far more closely than father and 

 son. People often wonder why such-and-such a great man's son should 

 not be a great man also ; they ought, if logical, rather to ask why his 

 brothers and sisters were not all of them equally great men and women. 

 I will not insult the intelligence of the reader by pointing out to him 

 why this should be — why the father's traits in such a case should be di- 

 luted just one half by the equal intermixture derived from the mother. 

 For the same reason, of course, two sisters ought by nature to resem- 

 ble one another far more closely than mother and daughter. Again, a 

 son ought on the average to resemble his father in character somewhat 

 more closely than he resembles his mother, because in the one case the 

 identity of sex will cause certain necessary approximations, and in the 

 other case the diversity of sex will cause certain necessary divergencies. 

 The barber in Leech's picture explains his young customer's defective 

 whiskers on the ground that he probably " took after his ma ! " but 

 experience shows that in such matters men usually "take after their 

 pa " instead. Once more, for a similar reason two brothers will tend 



