Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/106

96 women, fit to lead and control the social and political life of the state. In England, the eldest son is chosen for this purpose, a good arrangement, according to Samuel Johnson, 'because it ensures only one fool in the family'. For the theory of the leisure class forgets that men are made virile by effort and resistance, and the lord developed by the use of 'royal jelly' has rarely been distinguished by perfection of manhood.

The gain of primogeniture came in the fact that the younger sons and the daughters' sons were forced constantly back into the mass of the people. Among the people at large this stronger blood became the dominant strain. The Englishmen of to-day are the sons of the old nobility, and in the stress of natural selection they have crowded out the children of the swineherd and the slave. The evil of primogeniture has furnished its own antidote. It has begotten democracy. The younger sons in Cromwell's ranks asked on their battle-flags why the eldest should receive all and they nothing. Richard Rumbold, whom they slew in the Bloody Assizes, "could never believe that Providence had sent into the world a few men already booted and spurred, with countless millions already saddled and bridled for these few to ride." Thus these younger sons became the Roundhead, the Puritan, the Pilgrim. They swelled Cromwell's Army, they knelt at Marston Moor, they manned the Mayflower, and in each generation they have fought for liberty in England and in the United States. Studies in genealogy show that all this is literally true. All the old families in New England and Virginia trace their lines back to nobility, and thence to royalty. Almost every Anglo-American has, if he knew it, noble and royal blood in his veins. The Massachusetts farmer, whose fathers came from Plymouth in Devon, has as much of the blood of the Plantagenets, of William and of Alfred as flows in any royal veins in Europe. But his ancestral line passes through the working and fighting younger son, not through him who was first born to the purple. The persistence of the strong shows itself in the prevalence of the leading qualities of her dominant strains of blood, and it is well for England that her gentle blood flows in all her ranks and in all her classes. When we consider with Demolins 'what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon,' we shall find his descent from the old nobility, 'Saxon and Norman and Dane,' not the least of its factors.

XVI. On the continent of Europe the law of primogeniture existed in less force, and the results were very distinct. All of noble blood were continuously noble. All belonged to the leisure class. All were held on the backs of a third estate, men of weaker heredity, beaten lower into the dust by the weight of an ever-increasing body of nobility. The blood of the strong rarely mingled with that of the clown. The noblemen were brought up in indolence and ineffectiveness. The evils of dissipation wasted their individual lives, while casting an