142 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



Jacoby's argument could be drawn from the history 

 of the past ten years alone.^ 



There can be no doubt that the wider the basis of 

 selection adopted in all cases the better. The most 

 degenerate and worthless aristocracy in the world 

 was that of France prior to the Eevolution, and it 

 was also the most exclusive. In mediaeval times 

 French nobles who had married plebeian women and 

 their heirs to the third generation were adjudged un- 

 worthy to take part in the tournaments. Benoiston 

 de Chateauneuf, in his M^moire Statistique sur la dur^e 

 des families nobles en France, proves the average life 

 of a French noble family to be about three hundred 

 years. At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning 

 of the eighteenth centuries the haute noblesse d'etat 

 frequenting the French Court looked like une society 

 de malades. The bourgeoisie of Berne was formerly 

 a caste ; and of 487 families admitted to it between 

 1583 and 1654, there remained in 1783 only 168, or 

 about one-third. The English peerage has been justly 

 described by Macaulay as tlie most democratic in the 

 world. For that reason it is probably the most robust 



1 " We have seen a list of more than twenty princes and prin- 

 cesses [of the royal families of Europe] under medical care for brain 

 affections, and the number displays a perilous tendency to increase." 

 —The Economist, 9th February 1889. 



