ief,
the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails to
produce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand its
impossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, often
ending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill the
Y. M. C. A.'s with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgusting
Freudian suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens.
Neither promotes the sort of public morality that is aimed at.

25. Late Marriages

The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly
takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is almost
always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the average
poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it is nearly
always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been applied
to him, as in Shakespeare's case, or that his mental sensitiveness
approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley's. This fact, curiously
enough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise extremely astute
observer, namely Havelock Ellis. In his study of British genius he notes
the fact that most men of unusual capacities are the sons of relatively
old fathers, but instead of exhibiting the true cause thereof, he
ascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a man already in decline is
capable of begetting better offspring than one in full vigour. This is
a palpable absurdity, not only because it goes counter to facts long
established by animal breeders, but also because it tacitly assumes
that talent, and hence the capacity for transmitting it, is an acquired
character, and that this character may be transmitted. Nothing could
be more unsound. Talent is not an acquired character, but a congenital
character, and the man who is born with it has it in early life quite as
well as in later life, though Its manifestation may have to wait. James
Mill was yet a young man when his son, John Stuart Mill, was born, and
not one of his principle books had been written. But though the "Elements
of Political Economy" and the "Analysis of the Human Mind" were thus
but vaguely formulated in his mind, if they were actually so much as
formulated at all, and it was fifteen years before he wrote them, he was
still quite able to transmit the capacity to write them to his son,
and that capacity showed itself, years afterward, in the latter's
"Principles of Political Economy" and "Essay