3 76 Heredity. 



Germanic customs likewise accepted the heredity of guilt and 

 punishment, and decreed a general proscription. 



It is astonishing to find this doctrine clearly expounded and 

 reasoned out by a respectable and judicious Greek writer, born in 

 very enlightened times. Plutarch, in his essay on the Delays of 

 Divine Justice, after a very strong argument showing that the 

 family and the state form a true organism, declares that ' the fact 

 that divine vengeance falls upon a state or a city long after the 

 death of the guilty, has nothing in it that is contrary to reason. 



' But if this is the case with the state, it must also hold good of 

 a family sprung from a common stock, from which it derives a 

 certain hidden force, a sort of communion of species and of quali- 

 ties, that extends to all the individuals in the line of descent 



'Beings produced by generation are not like the products of art 

 What is generated comes from the very substance of the being 

 that gendered it, so that it derives from the latter something that 

 is most justly rewarded or punished on his account, inasmuch as 

 this something is his very self. 



' The children of vicious and wicked men are derived from the 

 very essence of their fathers. That which was fundamental in the 

 latter, which lived and was nurtured, which thought and spake, is 

 precisely what they have given to their sons. It must not, there- 

 fore, seem strange or difficult to believe that there exists between 

 the being which begets and the being begotten a sort of occult 

 identity, capable of justly subjecting the second to all the conse- 

 quences attending on the acts of the first' 



If we put in practice these conclusions of Plutarch we arrive at 

 frightful consequences. 



To sum up, we have found a perfect correspondence existing 

 between effect and cause. Nobility is, like heredity, a conserva- 

 tive, permanent force that tends to immobility. But both are 

 restricted within limits determinable only by experience. The 

 institutions of modern nations appear more and more to accept 

 this result, and to disregard all heredity save that which verifies 

 itself. Bentham, we think, expressed a growing opinion when 

 he said to the Americans : ' Beware of an hereditary nobility. 

 The patrimony of merit soon comes to be one of birth. Bestow 

 honour, erect statues, confer titles; but let these distinctions be per- 



