and rewarded the supporters of party with the. honors of the crown. At every general
election a hatch was made: eight peerages were .created in 1790; and in 1794, when a Whig
defection to him took place, ten were created. Sir Egerton Brydges, a very accomplished
man, both as a genealogist and a man of letters, published a special pamphlet on the point
in 1798. He undoubtedly expressed the views of the aristocratic party when he said —
“ ‘ In every parliament I have seen the number augmented of busy, intriguing, pert, low
members, who, without birth, education, honorable employments, or perhaps even fortune,
dare to obtrude themselves, and push out the landed interest.’
. . . “ What then is at present the portion of genuine aristocracy in the House of Lords ?
Calculations have been made by genealogists on this subject, of which we shall avail ourselves.
“ The learned author of the Ongines Genealogical analysed the printed peerage of 1828,
and found that of 249 noblemen 85 ‘ laid claim’ to having traced their despent beyond the
Conquest; 49 prior to 1100; 29 prior to 1200; 32 prior to 1300; 26 prior to 1400; 17 to
1500; and 26 to 1600. At the same time 30 had their origin but little before 1700. . . .
Here then we have a result of one-half of the peerage being at all events traceable to a
period antecedent to the Wars of the Roses. But of these a third only had emerged at all
out of insignificance during the two previous centuries.
“ Sir Harris Nicolas fixes as his standard of pretension in Family, the having been of
consideration, baronial or knightly rank, that is, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and applying
that test to the English Peerage in 1830, found that one-third of the body were entitled
to it.
“ There still remains in the male line, up and down England, a considerable number of
landed families of very high antiquity; but the gradual decay and extinction of these is the
constant theme of genealogists. Hear old Dugdale in the Preface to his Baronage in 1675.
“ He first speaks of the Roll of Battle Abbey, and says of it B p * There are great errors
or rather falsities in most, of these copies. . . . Such hath been the subtilty of some monks
of old.’ But, speaking of his labors, generally, he has these more remarkable Words: —
“ 1 For of no less than 270 families, touching which this first volume doth take notice,
there will hardly be found above eight which do to this day continue; and of those not any
whose estates (compared with what their ancestors enjoyed) are not a little diminished.
Nor of that number (I mean 270) above twenty-four who are by any younger male branch
descended from them, for aught I can discover.’” 4^
Hence ethnology deduces, that the prolonged superiority of the
English to any other aristocracies is mainly due to the continuous
upheaval of the Saxon element: and, at such point of view, the social
aspirations of Lord John Manners would seem to he as philosophical
as his poetic effusions are unique: —
H Let arts and manners, laws and commerce, d ie ;
But leave us still our old nobilift/ / ”
So, again, in Muscovy. ■ German wives and Teutonic officers have
metamorphosed the old Tartar nobility into higher-castes than I v a n
and his court would have reputed to he Russian. On the other hand,
the recreant crew of eonti, baroni, marchesi, in Spain, Portugal, Italy,
Sicily, and parts of Southern Europe, include some of the most abject
specimen's of humanity anywhere to he found. The physical cause of this
deterioration, from the historical greatness of their ancestral names, is
said to he—“ breeding in and in.” How, this may be true enough, as
an apparent reason; hut is there not a latent one ? History shows that
the families most degraded (in Portugal especially, where the lowest
forms are encountered,) are compounded of Iberian, Celtic, Arab,
Jewish, and other types — pure in themselves, but bad in the amalgam.
Pride of birth, for centuries, has prevented them from marrying
out of the circle of aristocracy. With rare exceptions, they are
too mean in person to be accepted by the white nobility of Northern
Europe. The consequence is, they intermarry with themselves; and,
as in other mulatto compounds, the offspring of such mongrel comminglings
deteriorate more and more in every generation. They
cease to procreate, and there are some hopes that the corrupt breed is
extinguishing itself. The Peninsular war, and the still more recent
Don-Pedro-experiences, left on the mind of every foreign legionary
concerned, the sentiment that, “ if you take a Castilian, and strip
Pim of all his good qualities, you will leave a respectable Portuguee.”
It is precisely the same with the Perotes, Creek aristocracy of Istam-
boul: on whom read Commodore Porter’s “ Letters from Constantinople,
by an American.” Such are unsolved enigmas in the rough-
hewn conceptions we can yet form of human hybridity.
It seems to me certain, however, in human physical history, that the
superior race must inevitably become deteriorated by any intermixture
with the inferior; and I have suggested elsewhere, that, through
the operation of the laws of hybridity alone, the human family might
possibly become exterminated by a thorough amalgamation of all the
various types of mankind now existing upon earth.
Sufficient having been said on the crossing of races, I shall close
this chapter with a few remarks on the propagation of a race from a
single pair, or what in common parlance is termed “ breeding in and
in.-’ It is a common belief, among many rearers of domestic animals,
and one acted upon every day, that a race or stock deteriorates
by this procedure, and that improvement of breed is gained by crossing.
Whether such rule be constant or not, with regard to inferior
animals, I am unprepared to aver — some authors having cited facts
to the contrary. Science possesses no criteria by which it can determine
beforehand the degree of prolificacy of any two species
when brought together; and so differently are animals affected by
physical agents, that actual experiment alone can ascertain the comparative
operations of climate upon two given animals when moved
from one zoological province to another — some becoming greatly
changed, others but little, and man. least of all. Recurring to our
definitions of remote, allied, and proximate “ species” {supra, p. 81],
let us inquire what are the data as respects mankind.
Will any one deny that continued intermarriages among blood
relations are destructive to a race, both physically and intellectually ?