138 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



to say, the more its members are given to marrying 

 within their own circle — the briefer is its existence. 

 As the result partly of luxurious living, partly of the 

 in-and-in process of breeding, social castes develop 

 in course of time a neuropathic condition, which 

 classes them among the unfit, and they die out like a 

 family which has contracted too strong a taint of 

 vice and insanity. Consanguineous marriages, al- 

 though more prevalent in aristocracies than in the 

 masses of the people, are not sufficiently so to 

 materially influence the vital statistics. But the 

 effect of privilege is to induce men and women to 

 choose consorts brought up under the same influences 

 as themselves, living the same life, cast in the same 

 mould, suffering from the same functional and in- 

 tellectual troubles, and thus a species of artificial 

 consanguinity is established which in the end is as 

 disastrous as the real. History shows us this principle 

 at work in aristocracies, but exclusiveness in any 

 class of the community, however humble, would no 

 donbt be productive of similar evils. 



The most exclusive caste in the world is that of 

 royalty, and it is among reigning families accordingly 

 that we find neuropathic conditions most highly 

 developed. From an exhaustive inquiry into this 



