The Editor: Nature or Nurture? 



235 



and Cambridge, her two great uni- 

 versities, turn out practically all the 

 eminent men of the country, or at least 

 have done so until recently. If nothing 

 more is necessary to ensure a youth's 

 success than to give him a first-class 

 education and the chance to associate 

 with superior people, then the prizes 

 of life ought to be pretty evenly dis- 

 tributed among the graduates of the 

 two universities, during a period of a 

 century or two. 



SUCCESS A FAMILY AFFAIR 



This is not the case. When we look 

 at the history of England, as Galton did 

 nearly half a century ago, we find 

 success in life is pretty strictly a family 

 affair. The distinguished father is likely 

 to have a distinguished son, while the 

 son of a nobody has a very small chance 

 of becoming distinguished. To cite one 

 concrete case, Galton found that the 

 son of a distinguished judge had about 

 one chance in four of becoming himself 

 distinguished, while the son of a man 

 picked out at random from the popula- 

 tion had about one chance in 4,000 of 

 becoming similarly distinguished. 



The objection at once occurs that 

 perhaps social opportunities yet play 

 the predominant part; that the son of 

 an obscure man never gets a chance, 

 while the son of the prominent man is 

 pushed forward regardless of his inher- 

 ent abilities. This, as Galton showed at 

 length, can not be held to be true of 

 men of really eminent attainments. 

 The true genius rises despite all ob- 

 stacles, while no amount of family pull 

 will succeed in making a mediocrity 

 into a genius, although it may land him 

 in some high and very comfortable 

 official position. Galton found a good 

 illustration in the papacy, where during 

 many centuries it was the custom for a 

 pope to adopt one of his nephews as a 

 son, and push him forward in every 

 way. If opportunity were all that is 

 required, these adopted sons ought to 

 have reached eminence as often as a 

 real son would have done ; but statistics 

 show that they reached eminence only 

 as often as would be expected for 

 nephews of great men, whose chance is 

 notably less, of course, than that of 



sons of great men, in whom the force 

 of heredity is much stronger. 



But we can come closer home and 

 present a telling argument, I believe, 

 from this, our own land of equal 

 opportunities, where it is a popular 

 superstition that every boy has a 

 chance to be president, and where the 

 youth reared in the log cabin and 

 educated in the little red school-house 

 is the dark horse we usually pick as a 

 winner. The picturesque environment 

 of some of our great men has so inter- 

 ested us that we have almost come to 

 believe it is this environment — the 

 log cabin and country school-house, 

 for example — that have made these 

 men great. A more careful scrutiny 

 of the facts may convince us that such 

 environment was nothing more than an 

 incident, sometimes beneficial, some- 

 times prejudicial. It was their sterling 

 heredity which carried these boys to 

 the top. Let us look at the records of 

 the eminent men this country has 

 produced, in order to see whether in 

 free America the prizes of life are in the 

 grasp of all. Success may be a family 

 affair in caste-ridden England; is it 

 possible that such could be the case in 

 our own continent of boundless oppor- 

 tunities ? 



Galton found that about half of the 

 great men of England had distinguished 

 close relatives. Now if our great men 

 of America have fewer distinguished 

 close relatives, environment will be 

 able to make out a plausible case, and 

 we will have to accredit some of the 

 success of England's great men to 

 family pull, rather than family heredity. 



America's great men 



Dr. F. A. Woods, chairman of the 

 eugenics research committee of the 

 American Genetic Association, has 

 worked out this problem, and his results 

 are a very satisfactory vindication of 

 our claims. 



First, let us find how many eminent 

 men there are in our history. Bio- 

 graphical dictionaries list about 3,500 

 and it will be convenient to take this 

 number, since it provides an unbiased 

 standard from which to work. Now, 

 Woods says, if we suppose the average 



