Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

Then the only trait left to be accounted for is the fine musical ear.

Now that gift for music may have come down to him from some distant foreparent, living in an age when such a quality had no outlet. Or it may have come down to him from some foreparent who lacked ambition or energy to use it in a striking way.

It happens very often that a son inherits his finest intellectual and emotional qualities from his mother.

And we know that a talent of any kind is more likely to lie dormant in a woman than in a man. For the woman may spend all her time and attention upon her home, her husband, her children.

I knew a case in which two sisters possessed considerable artistic talent Yet, so far as anyone knew, none of their foreparents had shown artistic ability. But one of the sisters told me that her mother had a remarkable gift for drawing, which she had never used, "except to amuse her children."

Now, when we come to look into the case of Handel, we find that his father's family never gave any sign of musical talent But of his mother's family, and of the families of his grandmother and great-grandmother we know little.

But Handel's father was ambitious and energetic, and his mother is described as follows:

The mother was thirty-three years old, and, we are told, was "clear-minded, of strong piety, with a great knowledge of the Bible… a capable manager, earnest, and of pleasant manners."

Is there any proof that Handel's mother had not a good musical ear? None. Is there any proof that she had not, lying dormant, some special gift for music, inherited from some ancestor? None.

In that day, and in that part of Germany, music was set little store by, and musicians were regarded much as actors were in England. Therefore any great musical gift which happened to be inherited by a woman would have small chance of being developed or used. And it is quite possible that Handel may have inherited his ear from his mother's family.

Again, the musical talent may have been a quality that had been improving by marriage for several generations. Or it may have been an accident, due to some physical process about which we cannot possibly have any direct knowledge.

For instance, just as some special excellence of some special organ may be handed down, so may some special defect A child may inherit the defect, or the excellence. Or he may inherit a talent from both parents, and so may excel them both.

A man may inherit his genius piecemeal from a hundred ancestors, some of them dead for centuries, or he may owe his special brilliance to some excitement, or even to some derangement of the nervous system. In fact, to what Lombroso calls "degeneracy." He may be like a river, fed by several ancestral streams. He may be the descendant of some "mute inglorious Milton." But one thing he is not – he is not a "mystery." There is nothing in his greatness more mysterious than the accumulation of money in a bank, or the agrandisement of a river by its tributary streams, or the sudden appearance of a pattern of unusual beauty in a kaleidoscope.

There is nothing in genius to belie heredity. There is nothing in genius that cannot be accounted for by heredity – if we remember the laws of variation, and of atavism, or breeding back.

"THE BORN CRIMINAL"

Speaking strictly, there are no "born criminals"; but there are some unfortunate creatures born with a nature prone to crime, just as there are others born with a nature prone to disease.

These "born criminals," regarded by their better-endowed or luckier brothers and sisters as "wicked," are the victims of "atavism" or of "degeneracy."

They are as much to be pitied, and as little to be blamed, as those born with a liability to insanity or consumption.

Atavism, as we have seen, is a reversion to an older and a lower type, a "breeding back," in some points, to the savage or the brute.

"Degeneracy" is the inherited result of vice, insanity, or disease in the parent Lombroso describes degeneracy as "the action of heredity in the children of the inebriate, the syphilitic, the insane, the consumptive, etc.; or of accidental causes, such as lesions of the head, or the action of mercury, which profoundly change the tissues, perpetuates neuroses or other diseases in the patient, and, which is worse, aggravates them in his descendants."

The atavist is a man born with the nature, or some of the traits of bestial or savage ancestors. He is bred back to the type that was before morals. He is born with strong animal traits, with few social qualities; with little or no moral brain. He is a modern child, born with the passions, or the appetites, or the intelligence, of an ape, or a cave-man. To expect him to rise to the moral standard of to-day, and to blame him if he fail, is as unreasonable as it would be to expect the same conduct from a gorilla, or a panther.

If the atavist is "wicked," the shark, and the wolf, and the adder are "wicked."

To say that the atavistic man has "reason" is no answer; he has not the kind of reason that makes for peace and order. His misfortune just lies in the fact that he is "bred back" to the kind of reason which, amongst the cave-men, perhaps, made a man a leader, or a hero, but amongst civilised Western people makes him a "born criminal."

I said before, that to blame a Spaniard for being proud is to blame him for being born of Spanish parents. It is just as true to say that to blame a man for being a "born criminal" is to blame him because some of his baser ancestors have accidentally passed on to him the traits of their lower natures.

Indeed, it is plainly absurd to blame a man for being "born" anything, since he had no hand nor part in his birth.

All we can do with regard to the "born criminal" is to pity him for his unhappy inheritance, and try to make the best of him. So far we have never tried to make the best of him; but have usually made almost the worst of him, by meeting his hate with our hate, his ignorance with our ignorance, his ferocity with our ferocity. Nature, or God, having cursed the poor wretch with a heritage of shame, we have come forward, in the name of humanity and justice, to punish and execrate him for his fatal mischoice of ancestors. It is as though we should flog a gorilla or a hyæna for having wickedly refused to be born a Canon of St. Paul's, or a Primitive Methodist Sunday school teacher.

But some will suppose that the "born criminal" might be a sober, law-abiding, and God-fearing man, "if he would try"; and they do not understand that the man with the atavistic brain cannot try.

He has not got the kind of brain that can try to be what we think he ought to be. We do not expect the bear to "try" to be polite, nor the hog to "try" to be cleanly. We know they cannot try to be either of those things. Neither can the atavistic man try to be something for which his nature was not made.

What is sauce for the atavist is sauce for the degenerate. He also is the victim of cruel fate. He also inherits misfortune, or shame, or disaster from his fathers. His nature is not a casting back to an ancient type: it is a nature poisoned, maimed, perverted, or spoiled through the vices or the diseases of those who brought him into the world.

The degenerate may inherit from a diseased or drunken parent an imperfect mind or an imperfect body. He may be born with a weak moral sense, or with weak lungs, or with an ill-balanced brain.

Proneness to crime or proneness to disease may be born in him through no fault of his own. The cause is the same in both cases: the vice or disease of a parent.

Now it is certain that we do not blame, but pity, and that we do not punish but help the victim whose degeneracy takes the form of disease. But we do blame and we do punish the victim whose degeneracy takes the form of immorality or crime.

In neither case is the degeneracy the fault of the degenerate: in both cases it is handed down to him by his parent or parents. Yet in the one case he gets our sympathy, and in the other case our censure.

There is neither justice nor reason in such treatment of those who have the misfortune to be born – in the true sense of the words – of "unsound mind."

Those who have made a scientific study of crime tell us that "psychic atavism is the dominant characteristic of the born criminal."

What is "psychic atavism"? It is a breeding back, or "casting back" to a lower type of mind. This atavistic mind is inherited by the "born criminal" just as certain "muscles common to apes" are inherited by some other men.

And we are told that this inherited atavistic mind is "the dominant characteristic of the criminal born." In other words, those men whom we have always blamed and punished as exceptionally "wicked," have inherited an atavistic, or criminal, mind from ancestors who died millions of years ago. The most noticeable and striking fact about the born criminal is his unfortunate inheritance of that atavistic mind.

And in the plenitude of our wisdom and the glow of our righteous wrath, we hang a man, or flog him, or brand him, or loathe him, because a cruel fate has visited upon him an affliction more pitiable than blindness, or lameness, or paralysis, or consumption.

In cases of psychic atavism the actual form of the brain, or the skull, is more or less like that of the older and lower type to which the luckless atavist has been cast back. The skull of the "born criminal" is the skull of the ape-man, or the cave-man. It has a low and retreating forehead, a heavy and square jaw, and is large behind, where the baser animal parts of the brain are placed.

Now, to expect the same morals and the same intelligence from a man cursed with the skull of a gorilla, or the brain of a wild hog, as from the man blest with the skull and brain of a Socrates or a Shakespeare, is like expecting figs to grow upon thistles, or fish to breathe without gills.

And to blame a man for the shape of his skull, or the balance of his brain, is as foolish as to blame him because he has no eye for colour or no ear for music, or because his "having in beard is as a younger brother's revenue."

Speaking on this subject in his excellent book, "The Diseases of Society," Dr. Lydston, Professor of Criminal Anthropology, who is a well-known authority in America, says:

Atavism, or reversion of type, is a most important phase of the relation of evolutionary law to criminal and vice tendencies… Reversion of type may be psychic (mental) or physical or both.

Whether associated with obvious physical reversions or not, psychic atavism is the dominant characteristic of the criminal. It is certainly the principal phenomenon involved in the study of the crime question, because it constitutes the dynamics of crime. The outcropping of ancestral types of mentality is observed to underlie many of the manifestations of vice and crime. These ancestral types or traits may revert farther back even than the savage progenitors of civilised man, and approximate those of the lower animals who, in turn, stand behind the savage in the line of descent…

Lombroso assigns to atavism a position of pre-eminence in the etiology of crime. In effect he thinks that crime is a return to primitive and barbarous ancestral conditions, the criminal being practically a savage, born later than his day. Obviously this view fits very accurately the so-called born criminal, comprising about one-tenth of the entire criminal population.

But what of the other victims of heredity: the criminal, or immoral "degenerate"? Let us take a few facts, and see what they will teach us.

Dr. Lydston testifies as follows:

Rev. O. McCulloch has traced the life histories of seventeen hundred and fifty degenerate criminal and pauper descendants of one "Ben Ishmael," who lived in Kentucky in 1790.

The Rev. Dr. Stocker, of Berlin, traced eight hundred and thirty-four descendants of two sisters, who lived in 1825. Among them were seventy-six who had served one hundred and sixteen years in prison, one hundred and sixty-four prostitutes, one hundred and six illegitimate children, seventeen pimps, one hundred and forty-two beggars, and sixty-four paupers.

It has been estimated by Sichart, Director of Prisons in Wurtemburg, that over twenty-five per cent, of the German prison population comes from a degenerate ancestry. Vergilis claims thirty-two per cent, for Italian criminals.