226 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



througli the furnace. In being born man undergoes 

 the firing process, so to speak, which fixes his 

 character for good or evil. That prevention is better 

 than cure will probably become the motto of the 

 churches as well as of the medical schools. 



The questions of an hereditary monarchy and a 

 governing aristocracy are of political rather than 

 scientific interest. Like all other questions affecting 

 the welfare of the community, they will eventually 

 be settled by considerations of expediency. On the 

 simple ground of heredity, no royal family or aris- 

 tocracy in the world occupies a tenable position. 

 Nothing could be more plausible in a scientific sense 

 than the idea of a class moulded of finer clay than 

 the rest of the community ; but unfortunately all 

 exclusive castes, as we have seen, have been placed 

 upon a false basis. Not only is the descent of quali- 

 ties, moral and physical, assumed to occur through 

 males alone, whereas the female exercises equal in- 

 fluence with the male in generation, but a system of 

 intermarriage in a caste tends to the deterioration of 

 the members of that caste, and that by the very opera- 

 tion of the law of heredity, which is supposed to con- 

 stitute their superiority. 



Kecent writers have doubted whether our present 



