Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

Mr. Blatchford, being anxious to fight against the doctrine of sin, builds a fatalist rampart, looks over the top, and says: "Can man sin against God? His actions are fixed." We walk round behind him and say: "Can man sin against man? Can social systems sin against man?" And the very rampart of fatalism he has erected hinders him from escaping from a withering fire, except by backing into obscurantism and ultra-Toryism.

This is the same error, differently stated. If man cannot be blamed, society cannot be blamed: therefore everything must remain as it is. I often wonder where the clergy learn their logic.

Men cannot be blamed: society cannot be blamed. But both can be altered: by environment. That is to say, if heredity and environment have endowed some man with reason and knowledge and inclination for the task, that man may be able to improve society, or the individual, by teaching one or both. And the teaching will be environment.

We cannot, as Mr. Marson pointed out in his article, "blame" environment; but we can attribute evils to the action of environment, and we can change the environment, always provided that heredity and environment have endowed us with the needful knowledge and brains for the purpose.

Let us look at the facts. There is a very terrible disease called diphtheria. It is caused by a small fungoid bacillus, and it has killed myriads of children, and caused much suffering and grief.

Do we blame "the vegetable bacillus"? No. We cannot blame a bacillus.

So I say we cannot blame diphtheria for killing children. No sane person ever suggested blame in such a case. But do we take any the less trouble to fight against diphtheria?

We do not "blame" a rat for eating our chickens, nor a boat for capsizing in a breeze, nor a lunatic for setting fire to a house, nor a shark for eating a sailor. But has any sane person ever suggested that we should not try to keep rats out of the henhouse, nor to ballast a faulty boat, nor restrain a madman from playing with fire, nor to rescue a sailor from a shark?

Mr. Marson asks ironically whether a social system "can be naughty," whether a social system may be praised logically, blamed logically, and held responsible logically.

I reply that a social system cannot be logically "blamed," any more than a shark, a disease, a fool can be logically blamed. But a social system may be approved or disapproved, and may be altered and abolished.

We cannot "blame" a man's environment, in the strict meaning of the word. But we may attribute a man's crime, or shame, or ruin to his environment.

We do not blame prussic acid for being lethal; but we do not allow chemists to sell it in large quantities to every casual stranger. Why? Because it is poison.

Well, the influenza bacillus is poison, falsehood is poison, vice is poison, greed and vanity and cruelty are poison; and it behooves us to destroy those poisons, and so to improve our social system and the environment of our fellow-men.

We come now to the idea that to teach men that all blame is unjust is to encourage them to do wrong. This idea is expressed, with characteristic clumsiness and obscurity, by Bishop Butler, in that monument of loose thinking and foggy writing, "The Analogy of Religion."

What Butler wanted to say, and tried to say, in more than 800 words of his irritating style, is simply that a child brought up to believe that praise and blame were unjust, would be a plague to all about him, and would probably come to the gallows. The reader will find it in Chapter VI. of "The Analogy."

Now, I quite believe that if the matter had to be explained to a child by Bishop Butler the effect would be fatal, because the poor bishop did not understand it himself, and was not good at explaining things he did understand. But the child would be in no danger if he were instructed by a man who knew what he was talking about, and was able to say what he knew in plain words and clear sentences. And I can say from my experience of children that I find them readier of apprehension, and clearer thinkers than I have found most clergymen.

As I have dealt with this argument in my chapter on self-control I need not go over the ground again. But I may say that we should teach a child that some things are right and some are wrong, and why they are right and why they are wrong; and that he was not to blame others because they either do not know any better, or are unable to do any better, and we should teach him that one learns to be good as one learns to write or to swim, and that the harder one tries the better one succeeds. And we should feel quite sure that the child would be just as good as his heredity and our training made him; and as for his coming to the gallows, if all children were taught on our system there would be no gallows to come to, and very few looking for that sacred instrument, the sight of which convinced Gulliver that he was "once more in a Christian country."

Is it necessary for me to answer the charge of presumption brought against me by Dr. Aked? Dr. Aked says I am presumptuous because I deny the belief of great and holy men of past ages. He says that the agreement of Cheyne and Perowne in praise of the fifty-first Psalm is typical of the world's consensus of opinion. And this Psalm is the cry of a broken heart for deliverance from sin. Dr. Aked goes on as follows:

To-day we are asked to believe that all this is a delusion.

We are told that man could not and cannot sin against God. We are invited to believe that the men of every age and nation whose hearts have bled in sorrow over accomplished sin, who have cried in anguish of soul for deliverance from the body of this death, whose joy in the realisation of divine forgiveness has flowed in strains of immortal joy over countless generations, were ignorant and foolish persons, inventing their sufferings and imagining their solace, and needing some journalist of the twentieth century to teach them that no man could really sin against God! We are, apparently, expected to believe that the author of this Psalm and the author of the "second Isaiah," that Paul and Augustine, the author of "Thomas A'Kempis," and John Bunyan, knew nothing of psychology and nothing of divinity, that they never understood their own experience, and, though they have interpreted humanity to uncounted millions of the children of men, yet lived and died in crass ignorance of the workings of the human heart The proposition is not modest. That any man should be found, however flippantly, to advance it is marvellous. That any human being should be found to accept it seriously is incredible.

Dr. Aked's argument amounts to a claim that we should believe in Free Will because most men believe in it, because many good and great men have believed in it.

But many millions of men have believed in a material hell. In which Dr. Aked does not believe. Many good and great men have believed in a material hell, and millions of men (some of them good and clever) still believe in a material hell. And Dr. Aked does not believe in it.

And when the doctrine of hell-fire was first assailed, what did the Dr. Akeds of the time declare? That without the fear of hell men would be wicked, and would do wrong in defiance of God; and that the theory that there was no hell of fire was "incredible." And what is this charge of audacity which Dr. Aked brings against me for denying sin? It is just the charge that was brought against Charles Darwin when he had the immodesty to declare that the human species was evolved from lower forms.

How was that theory met by the Dr. Akeds of the time? Darwin was ridiculed and denounced, and nearly all the religious world was aghast at his folly and his irreverence, and his presumption in advancing a theory which was contrary to the teachings of Holy Writ. But Darwin's theory was true.

Darwin's theory was true, and I claim that this theory is true. Is it any answer to tell me that I am presumptuous in opposing the beliefs of great men past and present? Darwin opposed the general belief, and Darwin was right and the general belief was wrong. Is it any more reasonable to condemn this theory for traversing the fifty-first Psalm than it was to condemn Evolution for traversing the Book of Genesis?

Are we never to deviate from the beliefs of our forefathers, be the evidence against those beliefs never so strong? How, then, shall knowledge increase or progress be possible?

Presumptuous to deny what great men in the past believed? Then the world is flat, and the sun goes round the world, and polygamy is right, and Saturday is the Sabbath day, and all Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Confucians, and pagans will be damned, and the abolition of witch-burning was a mistake, and Luther was presumptuous for resisting the authority of the Church of Rome, and Dr. Aked is presumptuous for differing from the Church of England. In such absurdities does the clerical mind entangle itself when it tries to think.

Mr. Marson says that if he were a burglar he would spend some of the money he stole in paying lecturers to teach the doctrine that men ought not to be blamed for their actions. But if all men were trained upon our principles there would not be any burglars.

However, let us see what Mr. Marson means. He means that if punishment and blame were abolished burglars and other wrongdoers might go scot free, and might rob, or kill, or cheat; and no one should say them nay. But Mr. Marson is a clergyman, and does not understand.

It is a strange notion this, that if you do not blame a man you cannot interfere with him. We do not blame a lunatic: even a Christian does not blame a lunatic. But we do not allow a madman to go round with an axe and murder people. We do not hang a madman, nor punish him in any way. If a murderer is proved to be mad he is pardoned and – restrained.

So, although we might not blame a thief, or a sweater, or a poisoner, it does not follow that we should allow him to go on stealing, or sweating, or murdering.

We propose to defend society from the individual; but we propose to do more than that: we propose to do what the Christian does not attempt to do – we propose to defend the individual from society.

The Christian method of dealing with the burglar is to neglect him in his childhood and his youth, to allow him to become a burglar, from sheer lack of opportunity to become anything else, and then to lecture him and send him to prison.

But, my Christian friends, how do you find your system work? If you tell Bill Sykes he is a bad man, that the angels will not love him, that the fat successful sweater or idler will loathe and despise him, and if you send Bill to prison and hard labour for a term of years, will it always happen that William will repent and reform, and become a building society or a joint-stock bank himself?

Or do you find that poor Bill hardens his heart, and hates you; and that he comes out of your shameful prison, and from your cowardly and savage whips and chains, and burgles and drinks again, and learns to carry a revolver?

If we want to get rid of evil we must remove the cause of evil. It is useless to punish the victim.

It is with moral evils as with physical evils. When an epidemic of fever or smallpox comes upon us we do not punish the sick, nor blame them. But we isolate the sick, and we attack the cause of the sickness, by attending to matters of hygiene and sanitation. That is how we ought to deal with moral sickness.

Men do not live badly because they are "wicked," but because they are ignorant. The remedy lies in the study and adoption of the laws of the science of human life.

If we are to have a moral people we must first of all have a healthy people. If the working classes are to be made sober and pure and wise, the other classes must be made honest, and to be made honest they must be taught what honesty is.

But the Christian cannot teach what honesty is because he does not know. He cannot attack the causes of vice and crime, because he does not understand that vice and crime are caused. He has been taught that men do wrong because they will not do right, and that they can do right if they will.

The Christian blames the criminal, and punishes him, because the Christian believes that the criminal has a "free will."

But we should not blame nor punish the criminal, because we know that he is a victim of heredity and environment. So we should restrain the criminal, and try to reform him; and we should attack the environment which made him a criminal, and is still making more criminals, and we should try to alter that environment, and so prevent the making of more criminals.

For the hardened criminal, restraint may be necessary. It may be impossible to reform him. It may be too late.

But it is not too late to save millions of innocent children from a like disaster and disgrace. It is not too late to prevent evil in the future, though we cannot atone for the evil wrought in the past.

We know, and the Christian knows, that where a murderer destroys one life society destroys thousands. We know that all through our pursy civilisation, in all the fine cities of our wealth, our culture, and our boastful piety, the ruin of children, the production of monsters, the desecration of human souls, is going steadily and ruthlessly on. We know this, and the Christian knows this; but we propose to prevent it, to stop it, by striking at the root cause: the Christian hopes to check it by lopping off here and there one of the fruits.

That is one reason why I claim that Humanism is a better religion than Christianity; that is one reason why I claim that Christianity is a failure.

What is the cause of crime? The Christian does not know. What is the cause of ignorance? The Christian does not know. What is the cause of poverty? The Christian does not know.

For ages the Christians trusted to religion to rid them of pestilence. Science taught them to prevent pestilence. Now they trust to religion to rid the world of vice and crime. It is the same old error. Science has shown us the causes of vice and crime: science teaches us that we must attack the causes.

But the world is very ignorant in affairs of moral sanitation; and has an almost religious veneration for the sacredness of Grand Ducal ducks.

As for the children – why do not their parents take care of them? Perhaps because the parents were neglected by their parents.