This is a singular proportion or disproportion in a population among which the aged who supply so large a number of cases of senile dementia are numerous, but where alcoholism is rare. This fatal privilege has not attracted the attention of the leaders of that anti-Semitic movement which is one of the shames of contemporary Germany.[251] They would be less irritated at the success of this race if they had thought of all the sorrows that are the price of it, even at our epoch; for if the tragedies of the past were more bloody, the victims are not now less unhappy, struck at the source of their glory, and because of it, deprived even of the consolation of being able, as formerly, to contribute to the most noble among the selections of species. This is not true of the Jews alone. Beard, in his _American Nervousness_, remarks that the neurotic tendency which dominates North America makes of that country a land of great orators. The influence of race is as visible in genius as in insanity. Education counts for little, heredity for much. “By education,” said Helvetius, “you can make bears dance, but never create a man of genius.”[252] _Influence of Sex._--In the history of genius women have but a small place. Women of genius are rare exceptions in the world. It is an old observation that while thousands of women apply themselves to music for every hundred men, there has not been a single great woman composer. Yet the sexual difference here offers no obstacle. Out of six hundred women doctors in North America not one has made any discovery of importance; and with few exceptions the same may be said of the Russians. In physical science, it is true, Mary Somerville emerges; and in literature we have George Eliot, George Sand, Daniel Sterne, and Madame de Staël; in the fine arts, Rosa Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraini; Sappho and Mrs. Browning opened new paths for poetry; Eleonora d’Arborea, it is said (but the assertion is contested), initiated at the beginning of the fifteenth century legal reforms of almost modern character; Catherine of Siena influenced the politics and religion of her time; Sarah Martin, a poor dressmaker, influenced prison reform; Mrs. Beecher Stowe played a large part in the abolition of slavery in the United States. But of all these, none touch the summits reached by Michelangelo, or Newton, or Balzac. Even J. S. Mill, who was very partial to the cause of women, confessed that they lacked originality. They are, above all, conservators. Even the few who emerge have, on near examination, something virile about them. As Goncourt said, there are no women of genius; the women of genius are men.