"It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning meditatively.
"Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England."
"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and then, even if they have to come over here for it."
"For that and—your money—yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain people of yours, who are they anyway?"
"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world—as any you will find at home. They have their heredity—and only that—from all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."
"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"
"Circumstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and nature alone—as you were but now admitting—has hardly served to arrest the process by the survival of the fittest."