Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

There was more crime in the fifteenth century, when penalties were so severe, than there is to-day. There were worse crimes. There was more brutality.

The abolition of cruel punishments has diminished crime. The abolition of flogging in the army and navy has not injured either service. The improvement in school discipline has not lowered the moral standard of boys and girls.

But, it may be urged, the decrease in crime, and the improvement in morals are not due only to the increased leniency of punishments. They are due also to the spread of education, and to the improved conditions of life.

Exactly. That is my case. Decrease of punishment, and increase of education, have diminished crime and improved morals.

Punish less, and teach more; blame less, and encourage more; hate less, and love more; and you will get not a lowering, but a raising of the moral standard; not an increase in crime, but a decrease. And the improvement will be due to alteration for the better of – environment.

Chance has placed me very often in positions of authority. I have been in charge of rough and reckless men: soldiers, militiamen, navvies, workers of all sorts. I have never found it necessary to be harsh, nor to threaten, nor to drive. I have always found that to respect men as men, to treat them fairly and quietly, and to show a little kindness now and again, has sufficed to get the best out of them.

I have gone into the midst of a crowd of Irish soldiers, all drunk, and all fighting in true Donnybrook fashion, and have got order without a hard word, without making a single prisoner. Directly they recognised me they calmed down. Had I been a sergeant disliked by them they would have thrown me downstairs.

I have found the wildest and the lowest amenable to reason and to kindness. One of the greatest ruffians in the regiment once spoke rudely to me in camp, and even threatened me. I was then a lance-corporal, and a mere boy. I sat down and talked to the bruiser quietly for a few minutes, and from that day he would have done anything for me.

There was a blackguard in my company who once threatened to murder me. A few months later he was taken ill in the night and I attended to him, and probably saved his life. He never forgot it. It was but a small kindness, and he was what is generally called a scoundrel, but he showed his gratitude to me all the rest of the time I was in the army.

As a child I was brought up under strict discipline. I felt that it was a wrong method. I have "spoilt" my children; and they are better than I ever was.

Parents beat their children for their own errors. If a father cannot gain the respect and obedience of his children, it is because he is foolish, or violent, or ignorant. Children, soldiers, and animals are alike in one respect: they know and respect strength and reason. The quiet manager, officer, sergeant, parent, who knows his own mind, who keeps his temper, who is not afraid, can always get discipline and order. If I thought any one under my control or care was afraid of me, I should feel ashamed. If a master rules only by fear of punishment he is not fit to rule at all. When those over whom we happen to be placed in authority feel that we deserve their respect, we get it If you want to know whether a man is fit for command, put him with men who are not bound to obey him. Put him with his equals, where he has no power to punish nor to harm. Thus you will find the real leader of men: the man who leads with his brains.

I knew a young lieutenant once, a boy of twenty. He met a boy private in town, and saw that he had been drinking. Had he made a prisoner of the boy, the private would have got punished for drunkenness, and would have got drunk again. But the young officer sent for the boy the next day and said, "If I were you, Thomas, I wouldn't drink. It is a poor game, and your people would not like it" That boy was cured.

That same officer, if the men were unsteady on parade, would stand quite still and look at them. He had clear blue eyes, and his look was not stern, it was calm and confident. It brought the whole company to attention without a word. The officer was a man, and the men knew it, and they knew it because he knew it The boss who begins to bully is not sure of himself. Children, soldiers, workers, and animals know by instinct when the boss is not sure of himself.

Those who put so much trust in blame and punishment do not understand human nature. I said in a previous chapter that a man could not believe a thing unless his reason told him that it was true. I now say that a man cannot help believing a thing when his reason tells him it is true. The secret of reform is to make men understand.

The terrors of capital punishment, the terrors of the "cat," even the terrors of hell-fire fail to awe the criminal. That is because the criminal is stupid or ignorant, and lacks imagination. He hears of hell, and of death. But he cannot imagine either. He seldom thinks. He seldom looks beyond the end of his nose.

Discipline is not preserved in the army by the dread of the "cat," nor of the cells. It is kept by the fact that the wildest and most reckless man knows that he must obey, that the whole physical and moral force of the army is united to insist upon obedience.

If he disobey an order he will be punished. He does not care a snap of his fingers for the punishment. But he knows that after he has done his punishment drill the order will be repeated, and that he will be obliged to obey. He knows that the sentiment of the army is against him until he does obey.

I have seen an officer get a battalion into a mess on parade, and then lose his temper and bully the men.. And I have seen another officer on the same day drill the men and get them to work like a machine. The first officer did not know how to give the orders. The second knew his business, was sure that he did know it, and so let the men feel that he knew it.

It is with parents as with those two officers. The one who knows his duty, and does it properly, never has any occasion to lose his temper.

It is time Solomon's rod followed the witches' broom. It is time the "cat," and the chain, and the cell, and the convict's dress, and the oakum and the skilly, and the gallows followed the rack and the thumbscrew and the faggot and the wheel. It is time the leaders of the people were taught to lead. It is time the educated and the uneducated were given some real education. It is time that tyranny, cruelty, self-righteousness, superstition, and the bad old conventions of an ignorant past, gave place to reason, to science, to manhood.

"But," the penal moralist will demand, "if you propose to abolish blame and punishment, what do you propose to put in their place?"

And I answer, "Justice, knowledge, and reason – in fact, an improved environment."

The cause of most of our social and moral troubles is ignorance.

By ignorance I do not mean illiteracy only: there are many classical scholars who are really ignorant men. No: I mean ignorance of human nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome human life. It is this kind of ignorance which divides the people into two classes: rich and poor – masters and slaves. It is this kind of ignorance which causes men to sacrifice health, happiness, and virtue for the sake of vanity, and idleness, and wealth. It is the kind of ignorance which keeps twelve millions of people in a rich and fertile country always on the verge of destitution. It is this kind of ignorance which saddles mankind with the cost of armies, and fleets, and prisons, and police. It is this kind of ignorance which breeds millions of criminals, and educates them in crime. It is this kind of ignorance which splits a great nation into castes, and sects, and makes the realisation of the glorious ideal of human brotherhood impossible. It is this kind of ignorance which drives professing Christians to neglect the teachings of Christ. It is this kind of ignorance which makes possible the millionaire, the aristocrat, the sweater, the tramp, the thief, the degenerate, and the slave. It is this kind of ignorance which keeps the children hungry, drives the men to drunkenness, and the women to shame. It is this kind of ignorance which is answerable for all evil environments from which hate, and greed, and poverty, and immorality spring, like weeds from a rank and neglected soil.

We cannot get rid of this most deadly form of ignorance by means of blame and punishment. There is only one way to drive out ignorance, and that is by spreading knowledge.

What knowledge? Knowledge of human nature and of the essentials to a happy and wholesome life.

It is bad for men to be rich and idle; it is bad for men to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-taught, unhonoured, and unloved.

Whilst life is a sordid scramble, in which the prizes are pernicious wealth, and luxury, and idleness, and in which the blanks are hunger, ignorance, vice, unhappiness, the prison, and the gallows; immorality and crime must flourish as pestilence flourishes in a filthy, pent, and insanitary city. It is sad to see the custodians of the public morality bewailing the wickedness of men, and fostering the evil surroundings from which evil springs. It is as foolish as to bewail the presence of malarial fever, to punish the victims for spreading the disease, and at the same time to refuse to drain the marsh from which the malaria comes, because it is the property of a grand duke, who wishes to shoot wildfowl there.

What do I propose should be done. Why that, my friends, is another story. What I propose at present to do is to prove that crime and immorality are caused: to show what the causes are; and to point out that the recognised remedies are ineffectual.

While we have an idle rich, and a hungry and ignorant poor, we cannot get rid of vice and crime. To punish the criminals we have made, is unjust and useless; to pray for deliverance from plague: we must look to the drains – we must improve the environment.

No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant, no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be nourished, and taught, and trained.

Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable evils.

But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of Grand Ducal sport.

It is Mammon we worship, not God; it is property we prize, not life; it is vanity we love, and not our fellow-creatures. We are an ignorant, atavistic people; and our priests are wondrous moral.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – SOME OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

THE upholders of the doctrine of free will commonly fall into the error of considering heredity and environment apart from each other.

Father Adderley, in a lecture given at Saltley, told his hearers that "all our great scientists agree that people have the power to overcome their hereditary tendencies." Perhaps: but they can only get that power from environment; and if the environment is bad they will not get that power.

But the most surprising example of this mental squinting is afforded by the Rev. C. A. Hall, who may be said to squint with both eyes. For, in a lecture given at Paisley, this gentleman first shows that we can overcome our heredity, and then shows that we can overcome our environment And yet it never occurred to him that to prove the freedom of the will we must be able to overcome our heredity and environment together.

Mr. Hall's argument may be stated thus: By the aid of environment we can overcome our heredity; by the aid of heredity, or of good environment we can overcome bad environment; therefore we are superior to heredity and environment.

It is like saying: by means of natural intelligence and a good teacher I can become a good scholar; by means of natural intelligence and a good teacher I can correct the errors of a bad teacher. Therefore I do not depend upon intelligence nor teaching for my knowledge.

But I have answered Messrs. Adderley and Hall in my chapter on self-control.

An example of a similar error is afforded by a clergyman who wrote to me from Warrington. He said:

You can never hope to improve the social environment until you persuade men that they can rise superior to their circumstances.

The men are to be "persuaded" to rise. And what is that persuasion, but a part of their environment? And if men are "persuaded" to try, and succeed, to whom is the victory due? Is it not due to the "persuasion"? Of course it is. And the persuasion came from outside themselves, and is part of their environment.

The same clergyman said, "If heredity and environment have made the individuals of whom society is made up, heredity and environment have made society itself," and asked me how I could logically accuse society of injuring any one.

A strange question based upon a misunderstanding. The criminal injures society, society injures the criminal.

I accuse both of injurious action. I blame neither. I say both are that which heredity and environment made them. I say neither can help it. But I say that both can be taught to help it, and that both should be taught to help it. Is there anything illogical in that?

This brings me to the Rev. Charles Marson, a very clever and witty man, who is hopelessly muddled over the simple matter. In "The Religious Doubts of Democracy," Mr. Marson says:

Now, as reform starts by a feeling and conviction of blame, and cannot start at all unless it can say: "This is wrong. It might be right. This ought not to be and is, and need not be" so, if the answer is: "But this was as mathematically fixed at its birth as the path of a planet in its orbit," the poor reformed can only say, "Sorry I spoke"; and if he speaks again it will be to laugh at the Clarion for wasting ink in blaming orbits which are mathematically fixed.

Indeed, if I were a burglar, I would invest part of my swag in endowing Determinists to pour arguments and ridicule upon Christian magistrates and criminal codes, with their active and irritating blame. Certainly, if I were Lord Rackrent, I should invite my anti-reform friends, the Determinists, to dinner, take them to the opera, and send them round to address the Socialists, at my expense.