NEW TYPES AMONG MEN 165 



The answer is that estimable citizens are usually much like 

 other people, while Shakespeare, Lincoln, Macchiavelli, Nero, and 

 the Jukes family were very different. Variability is what attracts 

 attention. It is the variant, the man with new ideas, new methods, 

 and new impulses who makes the great success in business. It is 

 the variant, with new ideas, who commits the crimes that curdle 

 the blood. If an individual departs far from the average on the 

 bad side of the ledger we try to suppress him during life, and hold 

 him up as a terrible example after death. If he departs far on 

 the good side, we laugh at him, oppose him, misunderstand him, 

 praise him, or neglect him as the case may be, while he lives, but 

 after he is dead we write books about him and give his name to 

 our streets, our clubs, and our children. 



It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of 

 variability. Every gardener knows that if plants always bred 

 true we should never have such things as the double rose, the 

 seedless orange, and the sweet corn. We should have to be con- 

 tent with the single wild rose, the sour wild orange, and the small 

 and tasteless wild corn. Among animals this same variability has 

 given us the stocky percheron, the slender race horse, and the 

 shaggy pony, all from the same species. Among men we have not 

 only white and black, Jew and Gentile, Teuton and Slav, but 

 "high-brows" and "low-brows," and dainty society belles and 

 coarse- featured factory girls. Such variability is a great advan- 

 tage. It is indeed regrettable that every high type must have its 

 corresponding low type, but society can restrain the activities 

 of the low far more easily than it can dispense with the guidance 

 and inspiration of the high. Blot out a thousand names from 

 religion and philosophy, another thousand from politics, and 

 equal numbers from art, literature, and science. These 5,000 

 amount to about one in 300,000 compared with the people now 

 living, or perhaps one in ten million or more among the people 

 who have lived since the days of the Hebrew patriarchs. But 



