Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

A child is not born with a conscience; but with the rudiments of a conscience: the materials from which a conscience may or may not be developed – by environment.

A child is not born with capacities, but only with potentialities, or possibilities, for good or evil, which may or may not be developed – by environment.

A child is born absolutely without knowledge. Every atom of knowledge he gets must be got from his environment.

Every faculty of body or of mind grows stronger with use and weaker with disuse. This is as true of the reason and the will as of the muscles.

The sailor has better sight than the townsman, because his eyes get better exercise. The blind have sharper ears than ours, because they depend more on their hearing.

Exercise of the mind "alters the arrangement of the grey matter of the brain," and so alters the morals, the memory, and the reasoning powers.

Just as dumb-bells, rowing, or delving develop the muscles, thought, study, and conversation develop the brain.

And everything that changes, or develops, muscle or brain is a part of our environment.

There must be bounds to the powers of environment, but no man has yet discovered the limits, and few have dared to place them wide enough.

But the scope of environment is undoubtedly so great, as I shall try to prove, that, be the heredity what it may, environment has power to save or damn.

Let us think what it means to be born quite without knowledge. Let us think what it means to owe all that we learn to environment.

So it is. Were it not for the action of environment, for the help of other men and women, we should live and die as animals; without morality, without decency, without the use of tools, or arms, or arts, or letters. We should be savages, or superior kinds of apes. That we are civilised and cultured men and women we owe to the fellow-creatures who gave into our infant hands the key to the stored-up knowledge and experience of the race.

The main difference between the Europe of to-day and the Europe of the old Stone Age is one of knowledge: that is, of environment

Suppose that a child of Twentieth-Century parents could be born into the environment of an earlier century. Would he grow up with the ideas of to-day, or with the ideas of those who taught and trained him? Most certainly he would fall into step with his environment: he would think with those with whom he lived, and from whom he learnt.

Born into ancient Athens, he would look upon slavery as a quite natural and proper thing born into ancient Scandinavia, he would grow up a Viking, would worship Thor and Odin, and would adopt piracy as the only profession for a man of honour born into the environment of the Spanish prime, he would think it a righteous act to roast heretics or to break Lutherans on the wheel. Born into the fanatical environment of Sixteenth-Century France, he would have no scruples against assisting in the holy massacre of St. Bartholomew's.

Born a Turk, he would believe the Koran, and accept polygamy and slavery. Born a Red Indian, he would scalp his slain or wounded enemies, and torture his prisoners. Born amongst cannibals, he would devour his aged relatives, and his faded wives, and most of the foes made captive to his bow and spear.

Suppose a child of modern English family could be born into the environment of Fourteenth-Century England!

He would surely believe in the Roman Catholic religion, in a personal devil, and in a hell of everlasting fire.

He would believe that the sun goes round the world, and that any person who thought otherwise was a child of the devil, and ought to be broiled piously and slowly at a fire of green faggots.

He would accept slave-dealing, witch-burning, the Star Chamber, the whipping-post, the pillory, and the forcing of evidence by torture, as comfortably as we now accept the cat-o'-nine-tails, the silent system, and the gallows.

He would look upon education, sanitation, and science as black magic and defiance of God.

He would never have learnt from Copernicus, Newton, Harvey, Bacon, Spencer, Darwin, Edison, or Pasteur.

He would be ignorant of Shakespeare, Cromwell, the French Revolution, the Emancipation of Slaves, the Factory Acts, and the Household Franchise.

He would never have heard of electricity, steam, cheap books, the free Press, the School Board, the Fabian Society.

He would never have heard of the Australian Colonies, of the Indian Empire, of the United States of America, nor of Buonaparte, George Washington, Nelson, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln, nor Florence Nightingale.

Not one of these great men, not one of these great things would form a part of his environment.

Nor may we lightly claim that he, himself, would be of a more highly developed type, that his propensities would be more humane, his nature more refined.

For we must not overlook such examples as Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc, Chaucer, Mallory, and Sir Thomas More.

We must not forget that the refined John Wesley believed in witch-burning, that the refined Jeremy Taylor thought all the millions born in heathen darkness would be doomed to eternal torment.

Nor must we forget that many educated, cultured, and well-meaning Europeans and Americans to-day believe that unbaptised babies, and free-thinkers, and unrepentant Christians will lie shrieking forever in a lake of fire and brimstone.

We must not forget that it is now, in the Twentieth Century, that I, an Englishman, am writing this book to plead that men and women, our brothers and sisters, should not be hated, degraded, whipped, imprisoned, hanged, and everlastingly damned for being more ignorant and less fortunate than others, their fellows.

Taken straight from the cradle and brought up by brutes, a child would be scarcely human. Taken straight from the cradle and brought up amongst savages, the child must be a savage.

Taken straight from the cradle and brought up amongst thieves, the child must be a thief.

Every child is born destitute of knowledge, and every child is born with propensities that may make for evil or for good.

And the men and women amongst whom the child is born and reared are the sole source from which he can get knowledge.

And the men and women amongst whom the child is born and reared are the sole means by which his propensities may be restrained from evil and developed for good.

The child's character, then, his development for good or evil, depends upon his treatment by his fellow-creatures.

His propensities depend upon his ancestors.

That is to say, a child must inevitably grow up and become that which his ancestors and his fellow-creatures make him.

That is to say, that a man "is a creature of heredity and environment." He is what he is made by a certain kind of environment acting upon a certain kind of heredity.

He does not choose his ancestors: he does not choose his environment. How, then, can he be blamed if his ancestors give to him a bad heredity, or if his fellow-creatures give to him a bad environment?

Should we blame a bramble for yielding no strawberries, or a privet bush for bearing no chrysanthemums?

Should we blame a rose tree for running wild in a jungle, or for languishing in the shadow of great elms?

There are no figs on thistles, because the heredity of the thistle does not breed figs.

And the lily pines, and bears leaves only, in darkness and a hostile soil, because the conditions are against it.

The breed of the rose or the fig is its heredity: the soil and the sunshine, or the darkness and the cold, and the gardener's care or neglect, are its environment.

Let any one who under-rates the power of environment exercise his imagination for a minute.

Suppose he had never learnt to read! Suppose he had never learnt to talk! Suppose he had never learnt to speak the truth, to control his temper, to keep his word, to be courteous to women, to value life!

Now, he had nothing of this when he was born. He brought no knowledge of any kind into the world with him. He had to be taught to read, to speak, to be honest, to be courteous; and the teaching was part of his environment.

And suppose none had cared to teach him good. Suppose, instead, he had been taught to lie and to steal, to hate and to fight, to gamble and to swear! What manner of man would he have been?