Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

I deny that, and will give my reasons. But suppose we admit it. What follows?

Is it not better to teach and to train each generation well, than to teach and train them ill?

If mental and physical culture cannot be handed down; if the children of the educated and the well-developed must be born uneducated and undeveloped, is it not better to have a generation of strong and cultured men and women than a generation of degenerate weeds? Because we cannot, by education, raise a breed of Washingtons and Darwins, and Miltons and Nelsons, are we to content ourselves with a population of hooligans and boors?

If environment cannot permanently improve the breed, is that any reason for making the worst, instead of the best, of the breed we now possess?

And now, as to that question of improving the breed, I claim that environment would improve the breed, and would improve it as it has improved it in the past, by "natural selection."

How do cattle-breeders improve their stock? By breeding from the best animals, and not from the worst.

Men of weak or base moral natures, and men of weak minds and bodies will, I believe, generally reproduce their faults in their descendants. But, to marry, they must find wives.

I said a little way back, "take care of your women, and the race will take care of itself."

Good environment would "take care of the women." The women being properly nursed, fed, taught, and honoured, would select partners who would not shock them morally, nor disgust them physically.

Virtuous, refined, and intelligent women do not, in general – there are exceptions – love and marry men of weak minds, nor men of diseased bodies, nor men of low moral type.

Therefore, given proper environment, the "born criminal" and the mental weakling would not be able to find wives. But that is not the only way in which good environment would affect the breed. Nearly all degeneration is caused by bad environment, and good environment would stop degeneration, and by that means would improve the mental, moral, and physical average.

It has been suggested, by some of the most dismal scientists, that to prevent the spread of degeneration we should prevent degenerates from marrying. But I think a sounder method would be to stop the production of degenerates, by abolishing the environment that produces them.

As to the atavist, or "born criminal," I would point out that one of the laws of heredity is the tendency to "revert to the normal." That is to say, genius and atavism do not "persist." In a few generations the atavist and the genius have bred back to the average level.

That, as I have pointed out, is due to the mixture of blood by marriage.

Thanks to this law, even the "born criminal" cannot often reappear. An example of the working of this law is afforded by the descendants of the Australian convicts, who have turned out excellent men and women.

I think, then, that we need not be seriously troubled by the gloomy forebodings of our pessimists. With bad environment human nature has no chance: with good environment human nature will take care of itself.

And now let us look at some of the facts in proof of the magical results of improved environment.

I have before me a newspaper report of an interview with Mr. George Jackson, secretary of the Middlemore Children's Emigration Homes. This society was founded some thirty years ago, and has since sent out to Canada more than three thousand children from the slums.

The children came from the worst of slums, and from the worst of homes. They are spoken of by the reporter as being rescued from homes "where they are in daily contact with grinding poverty and misery, in an atmosphere of moral and physical foulness, with parents who are drunken, criminal, and inhuman." And of these three thousand waifs not two in a hundred turned out badly.

To give an idea of the working of a changed environment in the case of these children, I will quote from the report of the Birmingham Daily Post:

Mr. Jackson's view ranges over some three thousand children of both sexes rescued from the very lowest haunts of misery and vice, picked up forlorn and deserted from the gutters of Birmingham, snatched from the evil influence of parents who had carried active cruelty or passive neglect to such terrible lengths that the retributive hand of human law had at last fallen upon them, from parents who would have deliberately forced their offspring to mendicancy, to thievery, or to prostitution. These three thousand worse than destitute little ones, these infants "crying in the night, and with no language but a cry." who had started their sad lives on the very threshold of that dark door over which is written, "All hope abandon," were rescued by kindly hands and carried into the sunshine. For a time they were fed, and clothed, and schooled, taught that there was something more in life than squalor and selfishness and vice, and then they were taken thousands of miles away from those foul slums in which their eyes had first opened to the murky light, their tender sensibilities first awakened to the bitter lesson of human pain and misery. They were taken to where God's fresh, free air sweeps across leagues of virgin forest and prairie, to where existence is vigorous, it may be, but healthy, and pure, and invigorating, to where conditions are such as to develop strong, self-reliant manhood, instead of debased and neurotic criminality. It was in the complete and sweeping character of the change that lay the wisdom of the scheme. On the lone backwood farmstead of Canada the slum child had no opportunity, even had he wished, of once more coming within the range of vicious influences such as he had left. There was no temptation to many of the vices with which cruel circumstances had made him so terribly familiar. Heredity of evil was cheated of its chances, and whatever tendencies to good remained were fostered and given full scope for development. Further, the degraded relatives were no longer able to act the part of a millstone around the child's neck, to fetter his every aspiration to a better life, to drag him down or keep him down to their own dark state… Hundreds upon hundreds of prosperous farmers in Canada at this day can look back to the dim past, when they sold matches or papers, or picked up as best they could, in the streets of Birmingham, a few stray coppers to take home to their dissolute parents; to the time when, with empty stomachs and with the rain and snow beating through ragged garments onto their little pinched bodies, they cried through the rigours of winter nights on a sheltered doorstep rather than face the blows and curses which awaited them in the only place which they could call home. They were born to poverty and crime "as the sparks fly upward," and they have lived to thank God for that kindly agency which rescued them from their inheritance of misery.

Of these three thousand children two thousand nine hundred and forty were saved – by a change of environment. Had the environment been left unchanged probably not 2 per cent, would have escaped ruin. As their parents were, so would they have been. Had their parents been rescued in their youth only 2 percent of them would have failed.

The experience of Dr. Bamado and his friends with the children taken from the slums was very similar. The percentage of failures was small, and the London papers, in their obituaries of the good doctor, speak enthusiastically of the value of his work, and say that thousands of children rescued by him and his agents "are now steady and prosperous citizens beyond the seas." Since Dr. Bamado took up the work over fifty-five thousand children have been saved – by changed environment.

From an article by Mr. R. B. Suthers in the Clarion of August, 1904, I quote the following account of the George Junior Republic, an American institution, founded by Mr. William R. George, in 1896.

The Junior Republic is a collection of 100 hooligans, juvenile criminals, and unfortunate boys and girls who live under a constitution based on that of the United States. The government is government of the citizens, for the citizens, and by the citizens. Children of all ages are admitted, but the rights of citizenship are not granted to those under 12, and at 21 the juniors are drafted into the great republic outside. Schooling is compulsory up to the age of 16, after which the citizen has the choice of many trades, in the Junior Republic, including farming, carpentering, printing, dairying, or he may be a cook, waiter, store keeper, or office boy. The girls may go in for dressmaking, cooking, and laundry work.

These boys and girls, recruited from the slums and the criminal forcing beds of the great cities, govern themselves. They make their own laws, appoint their own officials, run their own gaol, and are practically as free as the citizens of the big republic of which they become full-fledged members when grown up.

Mr. George asserts that he has never known them when administering the law, to give an unjust or foolish decision.

Remember they were hooligans, criminals, and wastrels.

It ought not to be necessary to argue that children well brought up will turn out better than children ill brought up. We all know that such must be the case: we all see every day of our lives that, such is the case: we all know the power of environment for good as well as for evil. But facts are stubborn things, and the above are stubborn facts.

I have hitherto dealt almost wholly with the environment of the poor, but it is needful also to say something as to the environment of the rich, as Mr. Chesterton's mistakes have shown.

The chief evils of the environment of the rich are wealth, luxury, idleness, and false ideals.

It is not healthy for young people to be brought up to do nothing but spend money and hunt for excitement. It is not good for young or old to have unlimited wealth and leisure. It is not good for men, nor women, nor children, to be flattered and fawned upon. Flunkeyism and slavery degrade and debase the master as well as the servant: the snob lord, as well as the snob lackey.

We have hundreds of religions in the world; but how many teachers of true morality? True morality condemns all forms of selfishness, all acts that are hurtful to our neighbours, to the commonwealth, to the race. In the light of true morality, a rich landowner, or a millionaire money-lender, is a greater criminal than a burglar or a foot-pad; and a politician or a journalist who utters base words is worse than a coiner who utters base coin.

This being so, all the rich are bred and reared in an immoral atmosphere.

But the atmosphere is polluted in other ways. The children of the rich are perverted with false ideals. They are taught to regard themselves as superior to the workers, who keep them. They are taught that it is sport to murder helpless and harmless birds and beasts and fishes. They are taught to toady to those above, and to expect toadyism from those below them. They are given tacitly to understand that it is their lordly right to command, and that it is the duty of the masses to obey. They are allowed to believe that to be born "spacious in the possession of dirt," or free to wallow in unearned money, is honourable, and that to be poor and landless is a proof of inferiority.

They are puffed up with false ideas of value, and suppose that to possess an opulence of pride and a beggarly smattering of useless and often hurtful knowledge, is more creditable than to be capable of making honest pots and pans, and boots and trousers; of laying level pavements, and cutting invaluable drains. They have their unfurnished minds lumbered with immoral ideas of empire, of conquest, of titles, of stars and garters. They are the spoilt children of Vanity Fair, and very many of them are the lamentable failures which their environment would lead us to expect.

No man is educated who has never learnt to do any kind of useful work; no man lives in a good environment who has not been taught to think of the welfare of his fellow creatures before his own, no life is sound, nor sweet, nor moral, which is not based on useful service. Therefore the environment of the rich is generally evil and not good.

These are not the reckless utterances of any angry demagogue. Every word I have written about the evils of idleness, of luxury, of arrogance, of vain-glory and self-love, is endorsed by the teachings of the wisest and the best men of all ages; every word is supported by the records of history, by the known facts of contemporary life; every word is in accord with the new and the old morality.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the environment of the rich "puts forth sins like scarlet flowers in summer."

CHAPTER NINE – THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIENCE

THE religious mind loves mysteries. Conscience has always been set down as a mystery by religious people. It has been called "the still small voice," and we have been taught that it is a supernatural kind of sense by which man is guided in his knowledge of good and evil.

Now, I claim that conscience is no more supernatural than is the sense of smell, and no more mysterious than the stomach.

If conscience were what religious people think it is – a kind of heavenly voice whispering to us what things are right and wrong – we should expect to find its teachings constant. It would not chide one man, and approve another, for the same act. It would not warn men that an act was wrong in one age, and assure them in another age that the same act was right. It would not have one rule of morality for the guidance of an Englishman, and another rule of morality for the guidance of a Turk. It would not change its moral code as the man it is supposed to guide changes his beliefs through education and experience. It would not give such widely different men of the same age and nation.

If conscience were really a supernatural guide to right conduct it would always and everywhere tell man what is eternally right or eternally wrong.

But conscience is changeable and uncertain. It is a magnetic needle that points North at one time and South at another time; that points East on one ship and West on another ship; that points all round the compass for all kinds of travellers on life's ocean; that has no relation to the everlasting truths at all.

Sceptics have pointed out that "conscience is geographical"; that it gives different verdicts in different countries, on the same evidence.

But I shall show that conscience is:

1. Geographical: that it is not the same in one country as in another.

2. Historical: that it is not the same in one age as in another.

3. Personal: that it is not the same in one person as in another.