The cruel fate of Dom Carlos of Portugal naturally enough produced philosophic and thoughtful articles in some of the journals of the day. An able writer told his readers that the “kingly caste” has characteristics peculiar to itself, “which illustrate the Darwinian law.” He does not say what Darwinian law, and I am afraid he would find it difficult to do so. He says that people who for centuries have had their own way (how many kingly families have done so?), who have always lived on good food and never tasted bad wine, and have constantly conversed with interesting people (not usually the chance of princes!) must certainly, if subject to “the laws which govern animal and plant life,” produce well-marked characteristics in their offspring—and he goes on to speak of a fine appetite for food (what he describes is really a morbid condition connected with indigestion) as indigenous to Royalty, and declares that the gift of recognising faces and remembering names is “a faculty cultivated by generations of practice.”

One must recognise with satisfaction the desire to explain the facts and varieties of human life and character by reference to “the laws which govern animal and plant life.” It is by faithfully and truly carrying out the inquiries suggested by that desire that the knowledge which is the sole and absolutely essential condition for the safe conduct of human life and the increased happiness of human communities, can be obtained, and by such inquiries only; and, further, only upon the condition that the investigation is conducted in the true scientific spirit with accuracy and without prejudice. The remarks upon the kingly caste which I have quoted above show with what “legerity and temerity” a clever and respected writer will formulate phrases and conclusions which are, in face of what Darwin and his successors have demonstrated, absurdly erroneous, in fact, topsy-turvy as compared with the reality.

The main doctrine which Darwin and his followers have established is that neither castes nor families of higher or lower living things, including man, acquire any new characteristics by exposure to special circumstances or by consuming finer or coarser food, which can or do become innate or fixed in the race. The individual may be improved or depraved, enlarged or enfeebled, by the conditions of his individual life, but he cannot transmit the qualities—the improvement, the depravity, the enlargement, or the dwindling—which have been thus attained by him to his offspring. The race cannot be changed in this way. All the parents can transmit is the quality which they themselves have inherited of resisting or of collapsing, of becoming enfeebled, or of showing strength and vigour, under certain given conditions. The characteristics of Royalty are not characteristics brought about by the Royal state, any more than the characteristics of English race-horses are brought about by the racing state or by life in a breeder’s stable. The characteristics of Royalty are like those of other living things, the characteristics of a certain family or blend of families or strains. Whatever characteristics distinct Royal families have in common with one another are not due to the existence of a natural law in virtue of which the occupations and opportunities of the Royal state produce “faculties” or “characteristics” in the “blood” or “stock.” Such similarity of characteristics is due either to the similarity of the demands and conditions of Court life in all parts of Europe, acting as an educating force on the individual, or to the intermarrying and consequent blending of family characteristics among a large proportion of the Royal Houses at present existing.

It is very difficult—indeed impossible until much more is written and read on the subjects of breeding and of psychology—to persuade people to abandon the notion that a man who has drunk good wine and conversed with interesting people will, as a direct result, transmit something which he has “taken up” or absorbed from the good wine and the clever people to his offspring, and that a faculty for this or that art or accomplishment cultivated by generation after generation is increased thereby, and transferred as it were into the very vitals of the race—the reproductive germs which each individual has within him. There is no truth whatever in these fancies. They are popular and very natural delusions, which are not only devoid of direct proof by simple observation and experiment, such as that made by all breeders of stock and by medical men, but are also contrary to the great general principles which have been found to explain the varied and most important facts known as to breeding, inheritance, and variation. The same erroneous theory of inheritance now applied to royalty has been put forward in regard to the feeble-minded, the ill-grown, and the incapable at the other end of the social scale.

The only way in which a quality, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, is intensified, made inherent and dominant in a race or strain or family, is by selective breeding—selection due to natural rejection of those individuals not possessing the quality, or to artificial rejection of such individuals by the stock owner and breeder. No human maker of breeds—whether of cattle, horses, birds, or plants—ever yet proceeded by exercising, feeding, educating, or otherwise manipulating his sires and dams; he simply selects those as parents which by natural variation have the quality, more or less, which he desires, and he destroys or sterilises those which fail to satisfy his requirements. He is perfectly confident that in this way he can ensure the reproduction and exaggeration or dominance of the characteristics which he desires; he knows that he cannot obtain a “strain” or “breed” by any treatment, any feeding, or education of those which are born without the natural, innate possession of the desired quality, in a more or less marked degree. Once the characteristic turns up as a congenital variation, it can be intensified by coupling its possessor with a mate of like quality; but both sire and dam have to be rigidly selected with this purpose in view. Such methods are not adopted in human families, even royal ones.

In considering these questions as to characteristic qualities or want of qualities in groups and classes of human communities, we see then that we have in the first instance to distinguish very broadly between the body or structure of the individual, and the “stirps” or germ of the race which he carries within him. The former may be vastly changed for the better or worse as compared with average individuals, without affecting in any way the latter. The germ is carried by the individual member of the race in an almost complete state of isolation or safety from the influences which affect the individual’s structure generally (his body as distinct from his germinal or reproductive substance) injuriously or beneficially. The germ varies also, but independently. That is a matter of primary importance. Equally important in the case of man is a peculiarity which affects his manifestation of qualities in a way unknown in any other living thing.

Human society, in more marked and dominating form, in proportion as it is what we call “civilised,” has created for itself an inheritance which is not dependent on the variations of strains and the laws of actual breeding. Over and above—very much above—what each man inherits in the form of qualities and characteristics of his special family and stock—is the enormous mass of accumulated experience, knowledge, tradition, custom, and law—which pervades and envelops, as it were, the mere physical generations of this or that pullulating crowd of human individuals. Tradition, at first conveyed by gesture and imitativeness from parents to offspring, then by word of mouth, then by writing, and finally by printed record, sanctioned and enforced by all kinds of persuasion and compulsion—has culminated in an educative discipline which affects every individual in the community in the most powerful way—and constitutes an inheritance of a significance and activity altogether transcending, and independent of that due to the physical transmission of bodily and mental qualities. Public opinion, law, knowledge, belief, custom, and habit exist, and pursue their own course of change, as it were, outside the successive bodily generations of a population. Yet they determine in very large measure the characteristics which each class, and the community as a whole, exhibit. We have to distinguish those results which are due to physical heredity, similar in man and in animals—from results due to this all-powerful education peculiar to man—education, which for civilised man proceeds from almost innumerable sources—from parents, nurses, playfellows, companions, social, professional, and political organisations, as well as from the professed teacher, and from the local peculiarities of the simplest conditions of life. Hence it is that man inherits very little in the way of ready-made instincts, tricks of his nervous mechanism—but, on the contrary, has an enormously long period of individual growth and education, and inherits “educability” to a degree which varies in every family and race.

To estimate correctly, and so to deal with these various factors in human life, we require to know in detail the laws of breeding, heredity, variation, and selection in animals, and, further, the laws or formulated results of enquiry as to the “educability” of the human being, the range and the limits of “education,” the relation of hereditary quality to education, the causes of mental aberration and defect, of mental qualities of all kinds, the value and the dangers of all kinds of educational influences, whether physical, social, or intellectual. These are matters in regard to which there must be in the future more and more of common knowledge and agreement; at present they are lightly touched by politicians and journalists in a way which is inconsistent with a knowledge of the facts or of their importance.

When publicists airily declare that the virtues of kings and the vices of paupers are both due to the hereditary transmission of characters acquired by the peculiarities of diet and exercise of the progenitors of these classes it is time to protest. To cite the name of Darwin and “the laws which govern animal and plant life,” in support instead of in condemnation of such baseless fancies, is, one must suppose, an evidence, not of a desire to mislead, but of a regrettable indifference to the conclusions of that branch of human knowledge which is of more importance than any other to the statesman and the philanthropist.

“Selection,” whether due to survival in the struggle for existence or exercised by man as a “breeder” or “fancier,” is the only way in which new characteristics, good or bad, can be implanted in a race or stock, and become part of the hereditary quality of that race or stock. This applies equally to man and to animals and plants. And this selection is no temporary or casual thing. It means “the selection for breeding” of those individuals which spontaneously by the innate variability which all living things show (so that no two individuals are exactly alike) have exhibited from birth onwards, more or less clearly, indications of the characteristic which is to be selected. Nothing done to them after birth, and not done to others of their family or race, causes the desired characteristic; it appears unexpectedly, almost unaccountably as an in-born quality. It may be a slight difference only, not easy to take note of; but if it enables those who possess it to get the better of their competitors in the struggle for life, they will survive and mate and so transmit their characteristic to the next generation, whilst those who do not possess it and are beaten in life and fail to obtain food, safety, and mates, will perish and disappear, and their defective strain will perish with them.