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Hereditary Genius
337
intelligent as man, the most social race is sure to prevail, other
qualities being equal.
Under even a very moderate form of material civilization, a vast
number of aptitudes acquired through the “survivorship of the fittest”
and the unsparing destruction of the unfit, for hundreds of
generations, have become as obsolete as the old mail-coach habits
and customs, since the establishment of railroads, and there is not the
slightest use in attempting to preserve them; they are hindrances, and
not gains, to civilization. I shall refer to some of these a little further
on, but I will first speak of the qualities needed in civilized society.
They are, speaking generally, such as will enable a race to supply a
large contingent to the various groups of eminent men, of whom I
have treated in my several chapters. Without going so far as to say
that this very convenient test is perfectly fair, we are at all events
justified in making considerable use of it, as I will do, in the estimates
I am about to give.
In comparing the worth of different races, I shall make frequent use
of the law of deviation from an average, to which I have already
been much beholden; and, to save the reader's time and patience, I
propose to act upon an assumption that would require a good deal of
discussion to limit, and to which the reader may at first demur, but
which cannot lead to any error of importance in a rough provisional
inquiry. I shall assume that the intervals between the grades of
ability are the same in all the races —that is, if the ability of class A
of one race be equal to the ability of class C in another, then the
ability of class B of the former shall be supposed equal to that of
class D of the latter, and so on. I know this cannot be strictly true, for
it would be in defiance of analogy if the variability of all races were
precisely the same; but, on the other hand, there is good reason to
expect that the error introduced by the assumption cannot sensibly
affect the off-
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