Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/270

264 because this same family is usually considered to have run out through external circumstances and to have followed an easy road from opulence and luxury to indolence and decline.

I shall show that among all the races considered in this book a family never runs out except by selection, no matter what the condition of environment may be. It is far from my wish to assume that environment has done nothing in molding these characters, and especially the moral characters that fall under this group of modern Spain. If it has done much in order to account for a considerable number of excellent ones, and these often as good as any princes that have ever lived, we must assume that it, like the pedigree, was calculated to bring great variations. This probability will be discussed when all the greater groups are compared one with the other. If environment did have much to do with molding their individual destinies there is no apparent culminated inherited effect from it. After five or six generations the people are practically neither worse nor better than at first.

Nineteenth century estimates had no effect in lessening the cruelty and arrogance of Ferdinand II., 'Bomba.' He was as bad a tyrant as ever lived in the middle ages. His son was a man of the same type. The conditions in Portugal and Spain were not very different from those in Italy where Ferdinand lived, and yet Portugal and Spain show us nothing to be compared with the brutalities of this father and son. Ferdinand II. was no more a tyrant than his grandmother or some others among the Hapsburgs; Francis of Modena, for instance. Carlotta alone of those belonging to the immediate branch of the throne of Spain (occurring in the middle of the chart) would be rightly characterized by the word tyrant. Yet the conditions in Spain for the formation of an autocrat might be justly considered as conducive to this effect as were those of Italy. It will be noticed that the branches in Spain are practically free from this tyrannical type, except that Carlotta, daughter of Charles III., showed something of this character, and one of her sons, Migual, exhibited it in a high degree. She was one among four children to show the violent type. On the other or left side of the chart where the blood of the tyrannical Caroline of Austria is closest, we have Bomba and Carlotta, two of the same type in three children, and also Henrique, one in two, and Francis II., one in one. Imitation may have played a role, but then why did a certain definite number imitate and only a certain number do so?

What shall we say here of free-will? How could it have played any appreciable part in molding the characters of these scores of people, each apparently filling a little link in a chain, the destinies of which