Everybody who is too much above or too much below the average of humanity—­an average which rises with the flux of time, but is absolutely fixed at any given moment of history—­does not live and disappears from the stage.

The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural or social monsters, and Nature inexorably blasts them with degeneracy or sterility, no matter whether they be the product of the organic life, or the effect of the social organization.

And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind—­monopoly of power, of wealth or of talent—­are inevitably destined to become in their latest offshoots imbeciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to become extinct.  Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of millionaires—­all follow the common law which, here again, serves to confirm the inductions—­in this sense, equalitarian—­of science and of socialism.

FOOTNOTES: 

[20] One of the most characteristic processes of social dissolution is parasitism.  MASSART and VANDERVELDE, Parasitism, organic and social.  (English translation.) Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London.

[21] BROCA, Les selections (Sec. 6.  Les selections sociales) in Memoires d’ anthropologie, Paris, 1877, III., 205.  LAPOUGE, Les selections sociales, in Revue d’ anthrop., 1887, p. 519.  LORIA, Discourse su Carlo Darwin, SIENNE, 1882.  VADALA, Darwinismo naturale e Darwinismo sociale, Turin, 1883.  BORDIER, La vie des societes, Paris, 1887.  SERGI, Le degenerazione umane, Milan, 1889, p. 158.  BEBEL, Woman in the past, present and future.

[22] MAX NORDAU, Conventional Lies of our Civilization. (English trans.) Laird & Lee, Chicago, 1895.

[23] While this is shown by all official statistics, it is signally shown by the facts collated by M. Pagliani, the present Director-General of the Bureau of Health in the Interior Department, who has shown that the bodies of the poor are more backward and less developed than those of the rich, and that this difference, though but slightly manifest at birth, becomes greater and greater in after life, i. e. as soon as the influence of the economic conditions makes itself felt in all its inexorable tyranny.

[24] TURATI, Selezione servile, in Critica Sociale, June 1, 1894.  SERGI, Degenerazione umane, Milan, 1889.

[25] JACOBY, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec l’heredite chez l’homme, Paris, 1881, p. 606.

LOMBROSO, L’uomo di genio, 6th edition, Turin, 1894, has developed and complemented this law.  This law, so easily forgotten, is neglected by RITCHIE (Darwinism and Politics.  London.  Sonnenschein, 1891.) in the section called “Does the doctrine of Heredity support Aristocracy?”

V.