The 

 Human 



Harvest 



Effects of 

 primoge- 

 niture 



[56] 



tion, though not to the individual. It lies 

 in the fact that the younger sons and the 

 daughters' sons were forced constantly back 

 into the mass of the people. Among the peo- 

 ple at large this stronger blood became the 

 dominantstrain. 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 fur- 

 nished its own antidote; for primogeniture 

 begat democracy. The younger sons in 

 Cromwell's ranks asked on their battle-flags 

 "Why should the eldest receive all and we 

 nothing?" Richard Rumbold, whom they 

 slew in the Bloody Assizes, "could never 

 believe that Providence had sent into the 

 world a fewmen 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 Pilgrim. They swelled Crom- 

 well'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 



