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Hereditary Genius
361
banishment among people of altogether lower grades of mind and
interests. England has certainly got rid of a great deal of refuse,
through means of emigration. She has found an outlet for men of
adventurous and Bohemian natures, who are excellently adapted for
colonizing a new country, but are not wanted in old civilizations; and
she has also been disembarrassed of a vast number of turbulent
radicals and the like, men who are decidedly able but by no means
eminent, and whose zeal, self-confidence, and irreverence far
outbalance their other qualities.
The rapid rise of new colonies and the decay of old civilizations is, I
believe, mainly due to their respective social agencies, which in the
one case promote, and in the other case retard, the marriages of the
most suitable breeds. In a young colony, a strong arm and an
enterprising brain are the most appropriate fortune for a marrying
man, and again, as the women are few, the inferior males are seldom
likely to marry. In an old civilization, the agencies are more complex.
Among the active, ambitious classes, none but the inheritors of
fortune are likely to marry young; there is especially a run against
men of classes C, D, and E—those, I mean, whose future fortune is
not assured except through a good deal of self-denial and effort. It is
almost impossible that they should succeed well and rise high in
society, if they hamper themselves with a wife in their early
manhood. Men of classes F and G are more independent, but they
are not nearly so numerous, and therefore their breed, though
intrinsically of more worth than E or D, has much less effect on the
standard of the nation at large. But even if men of classes F and G
marry young, and ultimately make fortunes and achieve peerages or
high social position, they become infected with the ambition current in
all old civilizations, of founding families. Thence result the evils I have
already described, in speaking of the marriages of eldest sons with
heiresses and
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