Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

The nobility of England, it is but just to say, stands higher in physical beauty and strength, and in intellectual force, than any other “peerage” in Europe. But it would long since have died out from inanition, had it not maintained itself by very frequent marriages with the yeomanry and the peasant classes, and by constant accessions from the commercial men and mechanics of England through the appointment of fresh peers therefrom, with an occasional admixture of brewers and Jews. The progeny of a class of this sort exhibits higher mental and physical qualities than are shown in the children of parents who are themselves the product of intermarriages for a series of generations. Of course there are exceptions to this generalization. There may be able children of degenerate sires. But whether such instances are not proof of the rule depends upon the question, whether, from some earlier intermingling, better blood may not have been taken from the lower class.

There is another rule which it is believed is well established, that the firstborn inherits the highest qualities of the capabilities of the father and mother. This rule has a curious corollary, shown in early English history, and perhaps now, that these higher qualities are transmitted to the offspring in greater extent when the procreation is under circumstances of high mental or physical excitement, and in a marked degree when not sanctioned by legal forms. The bar sinister of heraldry is on the escutcheons of the highest, bravest, and greatest men in the upper classes of all nations.

What may be called domestic history in our country proves that the truths here spoken can and do appear where all men are politically equal, and that they require no privileged class to demonstrate a natural fact. Such occurrences may be tested by the reader of mature age who calls up retrospections of the family traditions of his own neighborhood.

Indeed, it is neither speculative nor theoretical to aver that the great longevity, physical strength, soundness of constitution, assured health, endurance, and mental and physical energy and activity of the earlier inhabitants of our country, came in the very largest degree from the intermingling and mixing of the blood of several