Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

And which is the better, to go back for a dozen generations blaming parents, or to begin now and teach and save the children?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN – THE DEFENCE OF THE BOTTOM DOG

FRIENDS, I write to defend the Bottom Dog. It is a task to stagger the stoutest heart. With nearly all the power, learning, and wealth of the world against him; with all the precedents of human history against him; with law, religion, custom, and public sentiment against him, the unfortunate victim's only hope is in the justice of his case. I would he had a better advocate, as I trust he some day will.

The prosecution claim a monopoly of learning, and virtue, and modesty. They may be justified in this. I do not grudge them such authority as their shining merits may lend to a case so unjust, so feeble, and so cruel as theirs.

Many of the gentlemen on the other side are Christian ministers. They uphold blame and punishment, in direct defiance of the teaching and example of Jesus Christ.

The founder of their religion bade them love their enemies. He taught them that if one stole their coat they should give him their cloak also. He prevented the punishment of the woman taken in adultery, and called upon him without sin to cast the first stone. He asked God to forgive his murderers, because they knew not what they did. In not one of these cases did Christ say a word in favour of punishment nor of blame.

Christians pray to be forgiven, as they forgive; they ask God to "have mercy upon us miserable sinners"; they ask Him to "succour, help, and comfort all that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation," and to "show His pity upon all prisoners and captives"; how, then, can Christians advocate the blame of the weak, and the punishment of the persecuted and unfortunate?

I suggest that men who do not understand their own religion are not likely to understand a religion to which they are opposed.

As I am generally known as a poor man's advocate, I ask you to remember that I am not now appearing for the poor, but for the wrong-doer. There are many very poor who do no serious wrong; there are many amongst the rich, the successful, and the respectable, whose lives are evil.

One does not live half a century without knowing one's world pretty well. I know the honourable and noble lord, full of gout, vainglory, and stealthy vices; I know the fashionable divine, with pride in his heart, milk on his lips, and cobwebs in his brain; I know the smug respectability, with low cunning under his silk hat, and chicanery buttoned up in his irreproachable frock coat; I know the fine lady, beautiful as a poppy, who is haughty from sheer lack of sense; I know the glib orator of mean acts and golden words; I know the elected person of much dignity and little wit,' and the woman of much loveliness and little love.

I have to defend men and women whose deeds revolt me, whose presence disgusts me. I have to defend them against the world, and against my own prejudices and aversion. For I also have a heredity and an environment, and therefore crochets, and passions, and antipathies. Though I can defend all victims of heredity and environment, though I can demand justice for the worst, yet my nature loathes the bully and the tyrant, and still more does it loathe the mean: the man of the Judas spirit, who barters children's lives, and women's souls, and the manhood of cities, for dirty pieces of silver. Such a wretch is not to be hated, is not to be punished: he is to be pitied and I am to defend him. But when I think of him my soul is sick. I feel as if a worm had crawled over me. I cannot help this. I cannot endure him. I am not big enough: I lack the grace. I pity him profoundly; but my pity is cold. I pity the devil-fish, and the conger eel; but I could not touch them. They are repulsive to me.

It is very difficult for us to separate the man from his acts. It is very difficult for us to hate and to loathe the acts, without hating and loathing the man. This is the old, old Adam in us, rebelling against the new altruism and the new reason. We are still a long way behind our ideals.

It is no part of my plan to flatter the world. I know you, my brothers and sisters, too well for that. There is a strong family resemblance between us. Your ancestors, also, had tails. And then, like Thoreau, "I know what mean and sneaking lives many of you lead." The majority of you, indeed, are still little better than barbarians. The mass of you waste your lives and starve your souls for the sake of beads and scalps, and flesh and firewater. Your heroes are, too, often, mere prowling appetites, or solemn vanities, ravenous for pudding and praise; mere tailor-made effigies, to stick stars upon, or feathers into; mere painted idols for ignorance to worship; embroidered serene-emptiness for flunkeys to bow down to: kings and things of shreds and patches.

Yes. We are all painfully human, and under a régime of blame and punishment may count ourselves extremely lucky if we have never been found out.

Do not let us stand in too great awe of our ancestors. They also trafficked and junketted in Vanity Fair. The prosecution lay stress upon the universal custom and experience of mankind The world has never ordered its life by rules of wisdom and understanding. It has paid more court to the rich than to the good, and more heed to the noisy than to the wise. The world has imprisoned as many honest men as rogues, has slain more innocent than guilty, has decorated more criminals than heroes, has believed a thousand times less truth than lies. Is it not so, men and women? Does not common experience support the charge?

Let us, then, understand each other, before we go any farther. The glory of manhood and womanhood is not to have something, but to be something; is not to get something, but to give something; is not to rule but to serve.

The greatness of a nation does not lie in its wealth and power, but in the character of its men and women. With greatness in the people all the rest will follow, as surely as when the greatness of the people wanes the rest will be quickly lost. The history of all great empires tells us this: Japan is just now repeating the lesson.

What is it most men strive for? Wealth and fame. These are prizes for little men, not for big men. They are prizes that often inflict untold misery in the winning, and are nearly always a curse to the winner. Vice and crime are fostered by luxury and idleness on the one hand, and by ignorance and misery on the other hand. The poor are poor that the rich may be rich; and the riches and the poverty are a curse to both.

Consider all the vain pride and barbaric pomp of wealth and fashion, and all the mean envy of the weakly snobs who revere them, and would sell their withered souls to possess them. Is this decorative tomfoolery, are this apish swagger and blazoned snobbery worthy of men and women?

The powdered flunkeys, the gingerbread coaches, the pantomime processions, the trumpery orders and fatuous titles: are they any nobler or more sensible than the paint, the tom-toms, and the Brummagen jewels of darkest Africa?

And the cost! We are too prone to reckon cost in cash. We are too prone to forget that cash is but a symbol of things more precious. We bear too tamely all the bowing and kow-towing; all the fiddling and fifing, all the starring and gartering, and be-feathering and begemming, all the gambling and racing, the saluting and fanfaring, the marching and counter-marching, all the raking in of dividends, and building up of mansions, all the sweating and rackrenting, all the heartless vanity, and brainless luxury, and gilded vice: we should think of them more sternly did we count up what they cost in men and women and children, what they cost in brawn and brain, and honour and love, what they cost in human souls – what they cost in Bottom Dogs.

Happiness cannot be stolen; nor won by cheating, as though life were a game of cards. The man who would be happy must find his duty, and do it. In no other way can man or woman find real happiness, under the sun. But the world, so far has quite a different creed. And the common experience, on which the Christians so much depend, is not on the side of the angels. And that is why the Bottom Dogs are so numerous, and why so many of us lead "such mean and sneaking lives."

Descendants of barbarians and beasts, we have not yet conquered the greed and folly of our bestial and barbarous inheritance. Our nature is an unweeded garden. Our hereditary soil is rank. Talk about the trouble of bringing up children: what is that to the trouble of educating one's ancestors? O, the difficulty I have had with mine.

My friends: you have read my statement of the case for the Bottom Dog; you have read the arguments I have used in support of that statement: you have read the evidence, and you have read my answers to the arguments of the other side.

I claim to have proved that all human actions are ruled by heredity and environment, that man is not responsible for his heredity and environment, and that therefore all blame and all punishment are unjust.

I claim to have proved that blame and punishment, besides being unjust are ineffectual.

I claim that the arguments which apply to heredity and environment apply also to the soul, for since man did not create the soul he cannot be responsible for its acts.

I claim to have explained the so-called "mysteries" of conscience, and of the "dual personality," and to have proved them to be the natural action of heredity and environment.

I claim to have proved that morality comes through natural evolution, and not by any kind of super-natural revelation.

I claim to have proved that the argument from universal experience is fallacious, and to have shown that universal experience has misled us in the manner of human responsibility as in so many other matters.

I claim to have proved that the theory here advocated is based upon justice and reason, and is more moral and beneficient than the Christian religion, under which so much wrong, and waste, and misery continue to exist unchecked and unrebuked.

I claim to have proved that the prosecution do not understand the case, and that their arguments are for the most part mere misrepresentations or misunderstandings of the issues and the facts.

It remains for me now to say a few words as to the wrongs suffered by my unfortunate client; and as to the necessity for so altering the laws and customs of society as to prevent the perpetration of all this cruelty and injustice; of all this waste of human love, and human beauty, and human power.

We are sometimes asked to think imperially: it would be better to think universally. Illimitable as is the universe, it appears in all its parts to obey the same laws. Its suns may be told by millions; but matter and force compose and rule them all. Carlyle spoke of the contrast between heaven and Vauxhall; but Vauxhall is in the heavens, by virtue of the same law that there holds Canopus and the Pleiades. We think of the dawn-star as of something heavenly pure, and of the earth as grey in sorrow and sin; but the earth is a star – a planet, bright and beautiful as Venus in a purple evening sky.

We gaze with wondering awe at the loveliness and mystery of the Galaxy, that bent beam of glory whose motes are suns, that luminous path of dreams whose jewels are alive; but we forget that Whitechapel, and Oldham, and Chicago, and the Black Country, are in the Milky Way. In that awful ocean of Space are many islands; but they are all akin. In the "roaring loom of time." howsoever the colours may change, the pattern vary, the piece is all one piece; it is knit together, thread to thread. All men are brothers. From the age beyond the Aryans the threads are woven and joined together. All of us had ancestors with tails. All the myriads of human creatures, since the first ape stood erect, have been like leaves upon one tree, nourished by the same sap, fed from the same root, warmed by the same sun, washed by the same rains. All our polities, philosophies, and religions, grow out of each other. We can never fully understand any one of them until we know the whole. Comparative anatomy, comparative philology, comparative mythology, all comparative sciences, tell us the same story of growth, of evolution, of kinship. Babylon and Egypt, India and Persia, Greece and Rome, Gothland and Scandinavia, Britain and Gaul; Osiris, Krishna, Confucius, Brahma, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, Mahomet: all are parts of one whole, all parts related each to other. The oldest nations speak in our languages to-day, the oldest savages survive in our bodies, the oldest gods have part in our religious forms and ceremonies, the oldest superstitions and faults and follies, still obscure our minds and impede our action. We cannot thrust the dead aside and stand alone: the dead are part of us. We cannot take a man and isolate him, and judge and understand him, as though he were a new and special creation. He is of kin to all the living and the dead. He stands one figure in the great human pageant, and cannot be taken out of the picture: cannot be cut out from the background – that background of a thousand ages, and of innumerable women and men. He belongs to the great human family: he, also, is in the Milky Way.

Old families, and noble families are made of parchment or paper: there is but one real family of flesh and blood, and that reaches back to the clot of jelly in the sea, and we all belong to it.

When I hear some little Brick Lane Brother talking about the true faith, as taught in a tin chapel in Upper Tooting, I think of the star-readers of the Aryan hills, of the dead gods, and the obliterated beliefs of ancient conquerors, long since eaten by worms, and of the shrivelled corpse in the museum who has lain grinning in his sandhole for thirty thousand years, amongst his grave pots, and ghost charms, and the uneaten food for the long journey to the great beyond. When I hear honourable members prating in the House about "Imperial questions," I think of the famished seamstress, the unemployed docker, the girl with the phossy jaw, whom the honourable gentleman "represents." When I read of the gorgeous stage-management of the royal pageants, I remember the graves of the Balaclava men, in the Manchester workhouse field, where the sods were spread out level over the neglected dead. When I see beautiful sculptures and paintings of Greek womanhood, I remember how, coming out of the art gallery where I had been looking at the picture of Andromache, I saw a white-haired old Englishwoman carrying a great bag of cinders on her bent old back. When I hear the angelic voices of the choirs, and see the golden plate on cathedral altars, I ask myself questions about that Bridge of Sighs where London women drown themselves in their despair, and about that child in the workhouse school who tamed a mouse because he must have something to love. When a callow preacher babbles to his grown-up congregation about sin and human nature, I remember the men and women I have known: the soldiers, the navvies, the colliers, the doctors, the lawyers, the authors, the artists; I remember the dancing-rooms in the garrison town, and the girls, and how they were womanly in their degradation, and sweet in spite of their shame; and I wondered what the reverend gentleman would answer them if they spoke to him as they often spoke to me, in words that were straight as blades, and cut as deep.

And often, when I mix with the crowds in the streets, or at the theatre, or in public assemblies, I feel that I am in the presence of the haunted past, and the whole human story unfolds itself to my mind: the primeval savage with "his fell of hair," fighting with other savages, under "branching elm, star-proof"; the Ethiopian warrior in his battle chariot; the bent slave, toiling on the pyramid; the armed knight errant, foraying, and redressing sentimental wrongs; the fearless Viking, crossing oceans in his open galley, to discover continents; the gladiator in the Roman arena; the Greek Stoics, discoursing at the fountain; Drake singeing the King of Spain's beard; St. Francis preaching to the birds; the Buddha, giving his body to the famished tigress; the Aryan at the plough, the Phoenician in his bark, the Californian seeking gold, the whaler amongst the ice, the ancient Briton in his woad – all the mysterious and fascinating human drama of love and hate, of hunger and riches, and laughter and tears, and songs and sobbings, and dancing and drunkenness, and marriage and battle, and heroism and cowardice, and murder and robbery, and the quest of God.

That wonderful human mystery-play, how softly it touches us, how deeply it moves us, with its hum of myriad voices, its vision of white arms, and flashing weapons, and beckoning fingers, and asking looks, and the ripple of its laughter, like the music of hidden streams in leafy woods, and the lisp of its unnumbered feet, and the weird rhythm of its war songs, and the pathos of its joy-bells, and the pity of its follies, and its failures, and its crimes – the pity; "the pity of it, the pity of it."

Possessed, then by this dreaming habit, this Janus-like bent of mind, I cannot think of the Bottom Dog apart from the whole bloodstained, tearstained tragedy of man's inhumanity to man. For the Bottom Dog is a child of all the ages, he plays his part in a drama whereof the scene is laid in the Milky Way. He recalls to us the long wavering war between darkness and light, the life and death struggle of the brute to be a man, the painful never-ceasing effort of man to understand.

We cannot look back over that trampled and sanguinary field of history without a shudder; but we must look. It reaches back into the impenetrable mists of time, it reaches forward to our own thresholds, which still are wet with blood and tears, and on every rood of it, in ghastly horror, are heaped the corpses of the men, and women, and children slain by the righteous, in the name of justice, and in the name of God. Though the gods perished, though the vane of justice veered until right became wrong, and wrong right, yet the crimes continued, the horrible mistakes were repeated; the holy, and the noble, and cultivated still cried for their brother's blood, still trampled the infants under their holy feet, still forced the maidens and the mothers to slavery and shame.

Men and women, is it not true?

From fear of ghosts and devils, and for the glory of the gods of India, of Babylon, of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, of France, of Spain, of England, were not millions tortured, and burnt, and whipped, and hanged, and crucified?

Witchcraft, and heresy, idolatry, sacrifice, propitiation, divine vengeance; what seas of blood, what holocausts of crime, what long-drawn tragedies of agony and Moody sweat do these names not recall? And they were all mistakes! They were all nightmares, born of ignorance and superstition! We have awakened from those nightmares. Our gods no longer lust after human blood. We know that heresy is merely difference of education, that there never was a witch; we know that all those millions wept and bled and died for nothing: that they were tortured, enslaved, degraded and murdered, by the holy, through ignorance, and fear, and superstition.

If we turn from the crimes and blunders of prophets and of priests to the laws of Kings and Parliaments, we find the same ignorance, the same ferocity, the same futility. I could fill a bigger book than mine with the mere catalogue of the punishments and the instruments of torture invented by tyrants, and land-grabbers, and superior persons for the protection of their privileges, and their plunder, and their luxury and ease. For thousands of years the whip, the chain, the rack, the gibbet, and the sword, have been used to uphold the laws made by robbers, and by idlers, and by ambitious lunatics., to punish the "crimes" of the ignorant and the weak.

Men and women, is it not true?

And all the agony and blood and shame were ineffectual. And always blame and punishment bred hate, and savagery, and more crime.

"But it is different to-day."

It is the same to-day. The laws to-day are defences of the foolish rich against the ignorant and hungry poor. The laws to-day, like the laws of the past, make more criminals than they punish. The laws keep the people ignorant and poor, and the rich idle and vicious. The laws to-day, as in the day of Isaiah, enable the rich to "add field to field, until the people have no room." The laws to-day sacrifice a thousand innocent children to preserve one useful, lazy, unhappy, superior person. The laws to-day punish as a criminal the child who steals a loaf, or a pair of boots, and honour as a grandee the man whose greed and folly keep the workers off the land, and treble the rents in the filthy and indecent slums where age has no reverence, and toil no ease, and where shame has laid its hand upon the girl child's breast.

What was the old denunciation of those who cried "peace, peace, when there is no peace," and what shall we say of those priests and holy men who cry "morality, morality," where there is no morality, where usury and exploitation are honoured arts: where crime and vice are taught to the children as in a school?