Social Consequences of Heredity. 



deeds, must have felt the heroic breath of those distant ages, 

 whose extinct thoughts become conscious in him; he has been 

 possessed with the instincts of his race, and, strengthened beyond 

 the measure of his own lowliness, he has been- uplifted to their 

 height 



Those communities which have accepted the heredity of virtues 

 and of merit, and who have seen fit to consecrate this belief by 

 the official institution of nobility must of course have also ac- 

 cepted the heredity of vices and of criminal tendencies. Hence 

 we have races that are accursed, unclean castes, proscribed 

 families, and the crimes of the father visited on the children 

 and the grandchildren. History teaches that the further we go 

 back into antiquity the more widespread is. this belief, and the 

 more numerous are the institutions and laws that give expression 

 to it 



In China, 1 when a man has committed a capital crime, a minute 

 inquiry is first made into his physical condition, his temperament, 

 his mental complexion, his prior acts ; nor does the investigation 

 stop at the individual it is concerned with the most inconsiderable 

 antecedents of the members of his family, and is even carried back 

 to his ancestry. This is in our view to do full justice to heredity. 

 But in the case of high treason, or when a prince is assassinated, 

 this same people, establishing an unfair solidarity between father 

 and children, prescribe 'that the culprit shall be cut up into ten 

 thousand pieces, and that his sons and grandsons shall be put 

 to death.' The Japanese laws, it is said, include in the punish- 

 ment the parents of the culprit 



The infliction on the children of the punishment due to the 

 parents is very common under the Mosaic law. The whole human 

 race 'inherit Adam's guilt, and suffer the penalty of the original sin. 



In the Middle Ages the Jews, an object of loathing, restricted 

 within their Ghetti, feared and at the same time despised by all, 

 paid the penalty of their forefathers' guilt the unheard of, the 

 unique crime of having killed a god. This is the most striking 

 instance afforded by history of a brand of reprobation and infamy 

 hereditarily transmitted. The barbarous codes that sprung from 



1 Gazette des Tribunaux, 31 Decembre, 1844. 



IT 



