The objection at once occurs that perhaps social opportunities might play the predominant part; that the son of an obscure man never gets a chance, while the son of the prominent man is pushed forward regardless of his inherent abilities. This, as Galton argued at length, can not be true of men of really eminent attainments. The true genius, he thought, frequently succeeds in rising despite great obstacles, while no amount of family pull will succeed in making a mediocrity into a genius, although it may land him in some high and very comfortable official position. Galton found a good illustration in the papacy, where during many centuries it was the custom for a pope to adopt one of his nephews as a son, and push him forward in every way. If opportunity were all that is required, these adopted sons ought to have reached eminence as often as a real son would have done; but statistics show that they reached eminence only as often as would be expected for nephews of great men, whose chance is notably less, of course, than that of sons of great men, in whom the intensity of heredity is much greater.
Transfer the inquiry to America, and it becomes even more conclusive, for this is supposed to be the country of equal opportunities, where it is a popular tradition that every boy has a chance to become president. Success may be in some degree a family affair in caste-ridden England; is it possible that the past history of the United States should show the same state of affairs?
Galton found that about half of the great men of England had distinguished close relatives. If the great men of America have fewer distinguished close relatives, environment will be able to make out a plausible case: it will be evident that in this continent of boundless opportunities the boy with ambition and energy gets to the top, and that this ambition and energy do not depend on the kind of family he comes from.
Frederick Adams Woods has made precisely this investigation.10 The first step was to find out how many eminent men there are in American