THE AVERAGE MAN.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 17, Issue 58, 24 July 1906, Page 2

THE AVERAGE MAN.

Genius is a phenomenon ; the average man is a law. He has seen Shakespears and Goethes and Napoleons and Wagners rise and fall, and he goes on calmly, knowing that it is he, and not the they,, who are the race. Despise him, kick him as you will, the last word is with him. He is Nature’s favourile : like a true mother, she loves her dull boy best. . . A Shakospoar was too much for her ; but she saw to it that his faculty perished with him. He died, a wonder among men ; and his family reverted to the average. Lost the abhorred thing should reappear in the course of generations, the family presently died out. The case is typical. It is almost a commonplace of the science of heredity that the appearance of extraordinary talent in any branch of a family means the extinction of that branch. How many of the greatest names of literature or art have descendants livimr to-day ? Or,' in the alternative, how many instances do you recall of poet fathers having poet sons—of sainted farthers having sainted sons ? . . . . It is a. discouraging thought of the Superior Person that Nature holds him in so little esteem that she would rather do without him than not. Perhaps it is by way of compensation that ho is frequently endowed with a more than average sense of his own importance to Nature. The Average Man is, as a rule, quite unconscious of his great destiny. It has probably never occurred to him—things seldom do occur to the Average Man—that he is the type, the race, the force which makes the world go round, but he does the pushing. In fact, he alone exists in sufficient quantities to accomplish that portentous feat. The Superior People do wonders in their way but they have no staying power. Their vitality exhausts itself in a generation or two. So with the Inferior People, whom it is a common mistake to confuse with the Average Man—as if average were anything but a safe “via media.” Nature walks in the middle of the road ; and only she knows what perils beset the ditches on either side.—“ Evening Standard.”