Terrible facts with regard to feeble-minded and defective women were given by Dr. Potts. He paid a visit to a girls' night shelter, and investigated the first twelve cases he found there. Here is their record:
1. Consumptive, both parents died of the disease.
2. Neurotic drunkard, with a family who had suffered from St. Vitus' dance.
3. Normal.
4. Deaf and mentally defective.
5. Neurotic and mentally defective.
6. No congenital defect, but health ruined by drink.
7 and 8. Feeble character.
9. Suffering from persistent bad memory.
10. Twice imprisoned for theft; daughter of drunken loafer.
11. Normal.
12. Mentally defective and suffering from heart disease. Thus, out of twelve only two were normal individuals. Yet the ten were free to go as they liked, and to bring up defective children.
"It is well known," said Dr. Potts, "that a large number of the inmates of penitentiaries are feeble-minded women."
We see, then, that a great many poor imbeciles are regularly sent to prison as criminals. On that point allow me to put in the evidence of Sir Robert Anderson, late of Scotland Yard. Speaking of the feeble-minded, Sir Robert said (I quote again from the London Press):
My deliberate, conviction is that our present prison methods and prison discipline are absolutely brutal to these poor persons. People say the law of Moses is brutal, but it is not so brutal as the present criminal system of England.
No one who has not been behind the scenes can understand in any measure the misery and cruelty of it. It is "seven days' hard labour," "a month's hard labour," time after time for these poor creatures, who ought to be dealt with like children. In prison they spend their miserable lives. Out of gaol they add to the number of their own species, and commit offences which send them back once more.
Our magistrates simply send them for another month or six months. But it is not the magistrates' fault. It is the fault of the law. And this goes on in what promises to be the most intellectually conceited age since God made man upon earth. Surely we might have some pity for these poor creatures! If we have no pity for them we should have regard for the public.
That is the testimony of the late head of the Criminal Investigation Department: an Assistant Commissioner of Police, and Barrister at Law.
Let us now return to Dr. Potts, of Birmingham, for a moment. In the speech above quoted Dr. Potts gave the causes of mental defects—which are the causes that lead these poor creatures to immorality and to crime, as follows:
1. Defective nutrition in early years of life.
2. Hereditary tendency to consumption.
3. Descent from insane or criminal stock.
4. Chronic alcoholism of one or both parents.
We have here, added by Dr. Potts, another cause of degeneracy: that is, defective nutrition in early life. In plain words, improper feeding, or semi-starvation.
Later, when we come to deal with environment, I shall show that there are many other causes of degeneration and of crime. But here I only point out that atavism and degeneration account for from thirty to forty per cent, of the criminals of the present day. That atavism and degeneration are forced upon the unborn child by heredity; that therefore these forty per cent, of our criminals are unfortunate victims of fate, and are no more blameworthy nor wicked than the victims of a railway accident, or an earthquake, or an epidemic of cholera or smallpox.
They should, as I claimed before, be pitied, and not blamed; they should be helped, not punished.
Unhappy, unblest atavistic man, that in lieu of love has only lust, in lieu of wisdom only cunning, in lieu of power violence; and with a whole world to walk in, as in a garden fair, lies wallowing hideously in the foul dungeon of his own unlightened soul.
Unhappy criminal born, most pitiful dreadful of developed creatures; lonelier and more accursed than banded wolf or solitary tiger: a waif, a spoil, a pariah "born out of his due time":
A scribe's work writ awry and blurred,
Spoiled music, with no perfect word, a wretched, horrible Ishmael with his hand against the hand of every man, and every man's hand implacably against his.
On him, it would appear, has fallen the doom of the prophet, and instead of sweet spices there is rottenness, instead of a girdle a rope: branding instead of beauty.
In the barren garden of his mind no flowers will blow, his trees will bear no fruit All human pleasure is to him a Circe cup; he finds no pathos in the children's laughter, no beauty in the dawn-shine; no glory in the constellations.
What are we to do for this wretched desperate brother who will not love us though we whip him with whips of wire, who will not make friends of us though we spurn and spit upon him; who, though we preach to him, cannot understand; who, though we teach him, cannot learn; who, though we hang him high as, Haman, will "die game," cursing us with his strangled breath, mocking us with his blinded eyes; and in spite of all our intellect and righteousness going back from us unbettered and untamed into the abyss of eternity and the laboratory of evolution, whence he and we were drawn: going back from us a savage still, and in his angry heart and baffled mind holding our half-fledged knowledge and green morality in derision.
Well, he is dead; his stiff neck broken, and his body wrapped in a winding sheet of lime.
And we? We remain the superior persons we are. We are civilised, and holy. We punish weakness with blows, and misfortune with chains. We teach sweet reasonableness with the cat-o'-nine-tails—steeped in brine. We exemplify gentleness and mercy with the gibbet and the axe. We brand the blind, and torture the imbecile, and execrate the miserable, and damn the diseased, and revile the fallen; we set our righteous heel upon the creeping thing, and thank our anomalous and hypothetical God of Love and Justice that we are not as those others—our atavistic brother and his degenerate children.
And our atavistic brother, the criminal born! He does not understand us, he does not admire us, he cannot love us. We fail, in some inexplicable way, to charm the deaf adder, charm we never so wisely.
But some day, perhaps, when the superior person has achieved humility, even the outlawed Bottom Dog may come by some crumbs of sympathy, some drops of the milk of human kindness, and—then?
When we speak of a man's environment we mean his surroundings, his experiences; all that he sees, hears, feels, and learns from the instant that the lamp of life is kindled to the instant when the light goes out.
By environment we mean everything that develops or modifies the child or the man for good or for ill.
We mean his mother's milk; the home, and the state of life into which he was born. We mean the nurse who suckles him, the children he plays with, the school he learns in, the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he eats. We mean the games he plays, the work he does, the sights he sees, the sounds he hears. We mean the girls he loves, the woman he marries, the children he rears, the wages he earns. We mean the sickness that tries him, the griefs that sear him, the friends who aid and the enemies who wound him. We mean all his hopes and fears, his victories and defeats; his faiths and his disillusionments. We mean all the harm he does, and all the help he gives; all the ideals that beckon him, all the temptations that lure him; all his weepings and laughter, his kissings and cursings, his lucky hits and unlucky blunders: everything he does and suffers under the sun.
I go into all this detail because we must remember that everything that happens to a man, everything that influences him, is a part of his environment.
It is a common mistake to think of environment in a narrow sense, as though environment implied no more than poverty or riches. Everything outside our skin belongs to our environment.
Let us think of it again. Education is environment; religion is environment; business and politics are environment; all the ideals, conventions, and prejudices of race and class are environment; literature, science, and the Press are environment; music, history, and sport are environment; beauty and ugliness are environment; example and precept are environment; war and travel and commerce are environment; sunshine and ozone, honour and dishonour, failure and success, are environment; love is environment.
I stress and multiply examples because the power of environment is so tremendous that we can hardly over-rate its importance.
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 betaughtto 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?
He would have been that which his environment had made him.
And would he have been to blame? Would it have been his fault that he was born amongst thieves? Would it have been his fault that he had never heard good counsel, but had been drilled and trained to evil?
But the objector may say that as he got older and knew better he could mend his ways.
And it is really necessary, strange as it may seem, to point out that he nevercould"know better," unless some persontaughthim better. And the teaching him to "know better" would be a change in his environment: it would be a part of his environment, for which he himself would deserve no credit.
The point is that, since he is born destitute of knowledge, he never could know good unlesstaughtgood by some other person. And that this other person would be outside himself, and part of his environment.
Now, how could the ignorant child be blamed if some power outside himself teaches him evil, or how can he be praised if some power outside himself teaches him good?
But he would have a conscience? He would be born with the rudiments of a conscience. But what his conscience should become, what things it would hold as wrong, would depend wholly upon the teaching he got from those who formed part of his environment.
In a cannibal environment he would have a cannibal conscience; in a Catholic environment a Catholic conscience; in a piratical environment a pirate's conscience. But of that more in its due place. Let us now examine some of the effects of environment.
The brain is the mind. When the brain is diseased the mind is diseased. When the brain is sick the mind is sick.
But the brain is part of the body. We see, hear, smell, feel, and taste with the brain. The nerves of the toes and fingers are connected with the brain; they are like twigs on a tree, of which the brain is the root. The same blood which circulates through the heart and limbs circulates through the brain.
It is only a figure of speech to speak of the mind and the body as distinct from each other. The mind and the body are one.
A wound in any part of the body—a burn, a stab, a lash—is felt in the brain. When the body suffers from illness or fatigue, the brain suffers also. When a limb is paralysed, the real paralysis is in a part of the brain. When the brain is paralysed the man can neither move nor speak, nor think nor feel. When the heart is weak the brain does not get enough blood, and the mind is languid, or syncope sets in ana the man dies.
We do not need a prophet nor a doctor to tell us that sickness affects the mind. We know that dyspepsia, gout, or sluggish liver makes us peevish, stupid, jealous, suspicious, and despondent.
We know that illness or weariness turns a sweet temper sour, makes a patient man impatient, a grateful man ungrateful. We know how trying are the caprices and whims of an invalid, and we commonly say of such, "he cannot help it: he is not himself to-day."
But we do not know, as doctors know, how searching and how terrible are the effects of some diseases on the brain. Dr. Lydston, inThe Diseases of Society, says:
The old adage,mens sana in corpore sano, is too often forgotten. Especially is it ignored by the legislator and penologist. A normal psychic balance and a brain fed with blood that is insufficient in quantity or vicious in quality are physiologic incompatibles. The nearer we get to the marrow of criminality, the more closely it approximates pathology.
That is to say that the sound mind depends largely on the sound body; that a brain fed with diseased blood, or with too little blood, cannot work healthily and well; and that the more we know of crime the closer do we find its relation to disease.
I quote again from Dr. Lydston:
Despite the scant and conflicting testimony of cerebrologists with reference to the brain defects of criminals, there is so much clinical evidence of the aberration of morals and conduct from brain disease or injury that we are justified in believing that brain defects of some kind affecting the mental and moral faculties is thefons origoof criminality. This defect, as already seen, may be congenital or acquired, and may consist of a lack of development due to vicious environment and faulty education, mental and physical.
The fountain from which crime arises, says this authority, is some form of disease, or defect of the brain. And such disease or defect may be inherited, or may be caused by bad environment: by improper teaching, food, and exercise. To feel the full force of this statement we must bear in mind that "children are not born with intellect and conscience, but only with capacities for their development."
Therefore, if the capacities for intellect and morals arenotdeveloped, we cannot expect to find the intellect and morals.
In other words, we have no right to hope nor to expect that the neglected child will grow up into the good and clever man.
Neither is it reasonable to hope for a cure by pumping moral lessons into a brain in which no moral sense has been developed.
That epilepsy has a bad effect on morals, and that epileptics are often untruthful, treacherous, and dangerous is as well known as that epilepsy is a form of degeneracy, and is often caused by improper feeding and neglect in childhood.
Hysteria also affects the moral nerves of the brain. Dr. Lydston says:
Hysterical women often bring accusations of crime against others. The victim is generally a man, and the alleged crime, assault. Physicians recognise this as one of the dangers to be guarded against in their work. Hysterical women in the primary stage of anaesthesia, sometimes imagine themselves the victims of assault. In one well-known case the woman accused a dentist of assault while he was administering nitrous oxide to her. Her husband was in the room during the imaginary assault.
Dr. Lydston tells us that Flesch examined the brains of fifty criminals, and found imperfections in all.
In twenty-eight he found, in different cases, meningeal disease, such as adhesions, pachy-meningitis, interna hæmorrhagica, tubercular meningitis, leptomeningitis, edema of the pia mater, and hæmorrhagic spinal meningitis; also atheroma of the bisillary arteries, cortical atrophy, and cerebral haemorrhage. In most cases the pathologic conditions were not associated with the psychoses that are usually found under such circumstances.
How many men have been hanged or sent to prison who ought to have been sent to lunatic asylums? According to Dr. Lydston, very many. As bearing upon that point I quote two passages fromThe Diseases of Society, which "give one furiously to think." The first is from page 172:
Cases of moral turpitude,mania furiosa, and other mental disturbances are met with in which the patient is harshly treated, because of supposed moral perverseness, and only the autopsy has shown how undeservedly the patient has been condemned. When a tumour or other disease of the brain is found in a punished criminal, the case is most pathetic.
The other passage is from page 221, and is as follows:
If the foregoing premises be correct, vice and crime will be one day shown more definitely than ever to be a matter to be dealt with by medical science rather than by law.
The "foregoing premises" here alluded to concern the increase in vice and crime through autotoxemia, or unconscious self-poisoning, due to over-strain and other evil conditions of life.
As to this self-poisoning, a few words may be said. It is known that birds who die of fright are poisonous. That is because the violence of the emotion, by some chemical action, evolves poison.
It is also known that when the human system is out of order it secretes poison. This poison affects the brain, and excites the baser passions, or injures the moral sense.
Self-poisoning may be due to the presence of poisonous matter in the system, or to the over-strain, or over-excitement, of business, or trouble.
We all know the effects of violent anger, of violent grief, or violent love, or violent emotion of any kind upon the health. We know also the effect of "worry," and the effects of fatigue and of improper food.
One of these effects is self-poisoning, and one of the results of self-poisoning is brain sickness, resulting often in vice or in crime.
We find, then, that disease may be caused by neglect in childhood, by starvation or improper food, by over-work, by terror, by excitement, and by worry, amongst a thousand other causes.
And we find that disease affects the brain, and very often leads to vice, to crime, to dishonesty, falsehood, and impurity.
And disease is one part of our environment.
A wound or a shock may have a wonderful effect on the mind. A man may slip and strike his head on a stone, and may get up an idiot A gunshot wound in the neck, a sword-cut on the head, may cause madness, or may cause an injury of the brain which will quite change the injured man's moral nature.
As to the effects of such accidents on the mind there are many interesting particulars in Lombroso's book,The Man of Genius, from which I am tempted to quote some lines:
It has frequently happened that injuries to the head, and acute diseases, those frequent causes of insanity, have changed a very ordinary individual into a man of genius.... Gratry, a mediocre singer, became a great master after a beam had fractured his skull. Mabillon, almost an idiot from childhood, fell down a stone staircase at the age of twenty-six, and so badly injured his skull that it had to be trepanned; from that time he displayed the characteristics of genius.... Wallenstein was looked upon as a fool until one day he fell out of a window, and henceforward began to show remarkable ability.
Lombroso also gives many examples and proofs of the influence of weather and climate on the mind; but for these I have no room.
Now, disease, and weather, and climate, and injuries are all parts of environment.
Food
We have seen that one cause of insanity and disease, and of immorality and crime, is degeneration. And we have seen that one cause of degeneration is "insufficient or improper food."
Children who are half starved suffer in body and in mind: therefore they suffer in intelligence and in morals.
Says Dr. Hall, of Leeds:
It matters but little whether a child be born and bred in a palace or a cottage—of pure pedigree or mongrel—if he does not receive a proper supply of bone-making food he will not make a good bony framework, which is the first essential of true physical well-being.
Amongst the poor it is a common thing for children to want food: not to have enough food. This is not the fault of the children, but is due to the poverty of their parents.
But it is common also amongst the poor for children to be fed upon improper food. Quite young infants, babies, indeed, are often fed upon salt fish, rancid bacon, impure milk. Cases are too numerous in which babies are given beer, gin, coarse and badly cooked meat, inferior bread, and tea.
This is not the fault of the children, but is due to the ignorance of their parents.
The results of such feeding, and of such starvation, are weakness, poorness of blood, deafness, sore eyes, defective intelligence, rickets, epilepsy, convulsions, consumption; degeneration and death.
Professor Cunningham says:
One point which is established beyond all question is the remarkable influence which environment and nurture exercise upon the development and growth of the child, as well as upon the standard of physical excellence attained by the adult According to the statistics supplied to the British Association Committee, children vary to the extent of 5 in. in stature, and adults to the extent of 3 1/2 in. in stature, according as the circumstances under which they are reared are favourable or otherwise.
Dr. R. J. Collie, M.D., speaking of the mentally defective children in the London Board Schools, says:
In a large number of instances, after the careful individual attention and mid-day dinner of the special schools, they are returned, after from six to eighteen months, to the elementary school with a new lease of mental vigour. These children are functionally mentally defective. Their brains are starved, and naturally fail to react to the ordinary methods of elementary teaching. In a certain proportion of the cases it is the result of semi-starvation.
The headmaster of a large school in London said to a Press representative:
Not 5 per cent, of my 400 boys know the taste of porridge. New bread, and margarine at fourpence per pound, with a scrap of fried fish and potatoes at irregular intervals, is responsible for their pinched, unhealthy appearance and their stunted growth.
Dr. Lydston, inThe Diseases of Society, says:
The quantity, quality, and assimilation of food pabulum is the keynote of stability of tissue-building. With the source of the architect's own energy sapped by innutrition, and the materials brought to his hand made pernicious or defective in quality or insufficient in quantity, structural degeneracy must needs result. The importance of this as regards the brain is obvious. It bears directly upon the question of the relation of malnutrition to social pathology.
So much has been written and said of late about the evil effects of starvation and improper food upon the health and minds of children, and so much and such strong evidence has been put forward as to the seriousness and the prevalence of the evil, that I need not go more fully into the matter here.
Millions of children are ruined in body and mind, millions of degenerates are made by bad feeding or under-feeding.
And the good and the bad feeding are both part of our environment.
Poverty, Labor, and Overcrowding
As the health affects the brain, and the brain the morals, all healthy and unhealthy influences have a moral bearing.
Bad air, bad water, bad drainage, bad ventilation, damp and dark streets and houses, dirtiness and over-crowding, all tell against the health, against the health of children most seriously, and all help on the deadly progress of degeneration.
Greyness and monotony of life, unclean, unsightly, and sordid surroundings, tedious and soulless toil, all tend to blunt the senses, to cloud the mind, and to oppress the spirit.
Millions of the working poor, who live in great and noisy cities, whose neighbourhoods are vast, huddled masses of sunless streets and airless courts, whose lives are divided between joyless labour and joyless leisure; the conditions of whose comfortless and crowded homes are such as make cleanliness and decency and self-respect well nigh impossible: millions of men, women, and children are here starved in soul as well as in body.
These people, throughout their anxious and laborious lives, sleep in the overcrowded cottages and tenements, ride in the overcrowded and inconvenient third-class carriages, sit in the crowded and stifling galleries at the theatre, are regaled with crudest melodrama, the coarsest humour, the most vapid music. When they read they have the Yellow Press and the literature of crime. When they get to the seaside they spend their brief and rare holiday in the rowdiest of watering-places.
They have no taste for anything higher? True. They have never been taught to know the highest. And their ignorance, and their slums, and their clownish pleasures, are part of their environment We need not ask whether such environment makes for culture, for joy, for health.
They have no refinement in their lives, these poor working millions. They have no flowers, no trees, no fields, no streams; no books, no art, no healthy games.
Worse than that, perhaps, they are paid neither honour nor respect: they are without pride and ambition; they have no ideals, no hope.
The environment that denies to human beings all pride and honour and hope, all art and nature and beauty, does not make for health, nor for morality.
The straitness of means, the uncertainty of employment, the looming shadow of hunger and the workhouse, send some to suicide and some to crime, but leave the impress of their dreaded and evil presence upon the hearts and minds of nearly all.
We must remember that these poor creatures human. The difference between them and us is more a difference of environment than of heredity. The hunger for pleasure, for excitement and romance, is as strong in their soul as in ours. Like ourselves, they cannot live by bread alone. Excitement, pleasure of some kind, they must have, will have. The hog is contented to snore in his sty, the cat is happy with food and a place before the fire; but the human being needs food for the soul as well as for the body. And there is ample environment to feed the hunger of the ignorant and the poor for excitement: the environment of betting, and vice, and adulterated drink.
In the poor districts the drinking dens are planted thickly. There is money to be made. And they are blatant and frowsy places, and the drink is rubbish—or poison.
I have seen much of the poor. I could tell strange, pathetic histories of the slums, the mines, the factories: of the workhouses and the workhouse school, and the police-courts where the poor are unfairly tried and unjustly punished.
Let me dip back into some of my past work, and show a few pictures. Here is a rough sketch of the women in the East End slums:
"Have you any reverence for womanhood? Are you men? If you come here and look upon these women, you shall feel a burning scorn for the blazoned lies of English chivalry and English piety and English Art.
"Drudging here in these vile stews day after day, night after night; always with the wolf on the poor doorstep gnashing his fangs for the clinging brood; always with the black future, like an ominous cloud casting its chill shadow on their anxious hearts; always with the mean walls hemming them in, and the mean tasks wearing them down, and the mean life paralysing their souls; often with brutal husbands to coax and wait upon and fear; often with loafing blackguards—our poor brothers—living on their earnings; with work scarce, with wages low, in vile surroundings, and with faint hopes ever narrowing, these London women face the unrelenting, never-ceasing tide of inglorious war.
"If you go there and look upon these women, you will feel suddenly stricken old. Look at their mean and meagre dress, look at their warped figures, their furrowed brows, their dim eyes. In how many cases are the poor features battered, and the poor skins bruised? What culture have these women ever known; what teaching have they had; what graces of life have come to them; what dowry of love, of joy, of fair imagination? As I went amongst them through the mud and rain, as I watched them plying their needles on slop-garments, slaving at the wash-tub, gossiping or bandying foul jests in their balcony cages, drinking at the bars with the men—the thought that rose up most distinctly in my mind was, 'What would these poor creatures do without the gin?'
"The gin—that hellish liquor which blurs the hideous picture of life, which stills the gnawing pain, which stays the crushing hand of despair, and blunts the grinding teeth of anguish when the child lies dead of the rickets, or the 'sticks' are sold for the rent, or the sweater has no more work to give, or the husband has beaten and kicked the weary flesh black and blue! What would they do, these women, were it not for the Devil's usury of peace—the gin?
"My companion took me to a bridge across a kind of dock, and told me it was known thereabouts as 'The Bridge of Sighs.' There is a constable there on fixed-point duty. Why?To prevent the women from committing suicide. The suicides were so numerous, he said, that special precautions had to be taken. And since the constable has been set there, so eager are the women to quit this best of all possible worlds that they have been known to come there at night with a couple of women friends, and to leap into the deep, still water while those friends engaged the constable in conversation.
"Do you understand it? The woman has been wronged until she can endure no more; she has sunk till she can struggle no longer; she has been beaten and degraded until she loathes her life—even gin has ceased to buy a respite; or she is too poor to pay for gin, and she drags her broken soul and worn-out body to the Bridge of Sighs, and her friends come down to help her to escape from the misery which is too great for flesh and blood to bear. It is a pretty picture, is it not? While our sweet ladies are sighing in the West End theatre over the imaginary sorrows of a Manon Lescaut or repeating at church, with genteel reserve, the prayer for 'all weak women and young children'—here to the Bridge of Sighs comes the battered drudge, to seek for death as for a hidden treasure, and rejoice exceedingly because she has found a grave."
Many of these poor women, perhaps most, are mothers. What kind of environment, what land of stamina can they give their children?
"Take care of the women, and the nation will take care of itself." Here is another sketch from thelife, taken in the chain and nail-making districts of Staffordshire.
"In the chain shops of the Black Country the white man's burden presses sore. It presses upon the women and the children with crushing weight. It racks and shatters and ruptures the strongest men; it bows and twists and disfigures the comeliest women, and it makes of the little children such premature ruins that one can hardly look upon them without tears or think of them without anger and indignation.
"At Cradley I saw a white-haired old woman carrying half a hundredweight of chain to the fogger's round her shoulders; at Cradley I saw women making chain with babies sucking at their breasts; at Cradley I spoke to a married couple who had worked 120 hours in one week and had earned 18s. By their united labour; at Cradley I saw heavy-chain strikers who were worn-out old men at thirty-five; at Cradley I found women on strike for a price which would enable them to earn twopence an hour by dint of labour which is to work what the Battle of Inkerman was to a Bank Holiday review. At Cradley the men and the women are literally being worked to death for a living that no gentleman would offer his dogs."
Thence to the domestic workshops. Old women, young girls, wives and mothers working as if for dear life. Little children, unkempt and woebegone, crouching amongst the cinders. No time for nursing or housewifery in the chain trade. These women earned from 6s. to 9s. a week. Some of them are, I see, in an advanced state of pregnancy.
And what pleasures have these people: what culture and beauty in their lives? This:
"Were they ever so anxious to 'improve their minds,' what leisure have they, what opportunity? Their lives are all swelter and sleep. Their town a squalid, hideous place, ill-lighted and unpaved—the paths and roads heel-deep in mire. Their houses are not homes—they have neither comfort nor beauty, but are mere shelters and sleeping-pens.
"In all the place there is no news-room nor free library, nor even a concert-hall or gymnasium. There is no cricket-ground, no assembly-room, no public bath, no public park, nor public garden. Throughout all that sordid, dolorous region I saw not so much as one tree, or flower-bed, or fountain. Nothing bright or fair on which to rest the eye.
"But there are public-houses. And in several of them I tasted the liquor, and spilled it on the floor."
Of how many towns and villages in Europe and America might the same be said?
Of how many women are these terrible descriptions true?
In the evidence given before the Royal Commission on Canal Labour, it was stated in evidence that men and women often worked for seven days and nights on the canals, and in the winter.
Some of the witnesses declared that the work was unfit for women, that it was "degrading." The Royal Commissioners could not understand the word degrading, and asked how it could degrade a woman to steer a boat. Here is one reply given by an angry witness:
Do you think it womanly work to push with a twenty-foot pole a boat laden with 30 tons of coal? If you saw a mother of a family climbing a four-foot wall, you'd think it was no work for women. I have seen a woman knocked into the lock with a child at her breast by a sudden blow of the tiller. I have seen my own sister-in-law climb the lock-gates at one end to go and shut them at the other.
Many of the "cabins" on the narrow boats are about seven feet by five. In such cabins sleep the "captain" and his family; in one case a man and his wife, a girl of ten, a couple of younger children, and two boys of fourteen and sixteen years of age.
Those are a few glimpses of the environment of the women and the children of the poor.
I cannot quit the subject without again telling an experience which hurt me like a wound. It was in a workhouse school: a school where master and matron did the best they could do for the children so unfortunately placed.
Love Hunger
"As we crossed a bridge from one building to another the master said something about a fish-pond, adding, 'We do not catch fish here, but we catch a good many mice.'
"'Have you many mice?' I asked.
"'Yes,' said he, with a peculiar smile; 'there is hardly one of our big boys but has a live mouse in his pocket.'
"'A live mouse? What for?'
"'Well,' said the master, 'human nature is human nature, and the little fellows want something to love. Some time ago the inspector cautioned a boy about putting his hand in his pocket, and ordered him to be still. The boy repeated the action, and as I guessed what was the cause, I called him out. He had a live mouse in his trousers pocket, and was afraid of its climbing out and showing itself in school. He took it out on his hand It was quite tame.'
"But still more touching was a curious demonstration of the infants as we crossed their playground. Released from the restraint of parade discipline, these little creatures, girls and boys between three and seven years of age, came crowding round us. They took hold of our hands, several of them taking each hand; they stroked our clothes, and embraced our legs. Several of them seemed fascinated by my gold watch-guard (it is rather loud), and wanted to kiss it. I gave one the watch to play with—my own children have often used it roughly—and his little eyes dilated with admiration. They followed us right up to the barrier, and shook hands with us.
"'That,' said the master, 'is a peculiarity of all workhouse children. They will touch you. They will handle and kiss any glittering thing you have about you. It is because you are from the outside world.'"
What an environment. It set me thinking of the stories I had read about savages crowding round white men who have landed on their shores.
"From the outside world." "Something to love." In England—where some five millions a year are spent on hunting—such environment is forced upon an innocent and defenceless child.
One wonders as to the "hooligan." and the tramp, and the harlot, and the sot; how weretheybrought up, and had they anything to love?
There are many who under-rate the power of environment But there are few who deny the value of education. And education is environment. All education, good or bad, in the home or the school, is environment.
And we all know, though some of us forget, that good education makes us better and that bad education makes us worse. And we all know, though some of us forget, that we have to be educated by others, and that those others are part of our environment. For even in the case of self-education we must learn from books, which were written by other men.
And if we take the word education in its widest sense, as meaning all that we learn, the importance of this part of our environment stares us in the face. For as we are born not with morals, nor knowledge, nor capacities, but only with the rudiments of such, it is plain to every mind that our goodness or badness, our ignorance or knowledge, our helplessness or power, depends to a very great extent upon the kind of teaching we get.
The difference between the lout and the man of refinement is generally a difference of education, of knowledge, and training.
The root cause of most prejudice and malice, of much violence, folly, and crime, is ignorance. There would be no despised and under-paid poor, no slums, no landless peasants, no serfs, were it not for the ignorance of the masses,andthe classes. The rich impose upon the poor, and the poor submit, for the one reason: they do not understand.
If they were taught better they would do better. And the better teaching would be—improved environment.
It is not enough that people should be "educated," in the narrow sense of the word. Teaching may do harm, as surely as it may do good. All depends upon the things that are taught.
Much of the teaching in our Board Schools, our Public Schools, and our Universities isbad.
If teaching is to be "good environment," the teaching must be good.
National or local ideals are part of our environment. We are born into these ideals as we are born into our climate, and few escape their rule.
The ideals of England are not good. To succeed, to make wealth, to win applause—these are not high ideals. To buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; to make England the workshop of the world; to seize all rich and unprotected lands, and force their inhabitants into the British Empire—these are not great ideals.
But such national ideals are part of our environment, and tell against, or for, the development of our noblest human qualities.
A gospel of greed, vanity, and empire does not tend to make a people modest, nor just, nor kindly. Indeed, it is chiefly because of their greediness for commerce and wealth, and their ambition for empire, that the nations to-day are armed and jealous rivals. And it is chiefly because of their hunger for wealth, and their worship of vain display and empty honours, that the classes and the masses are hostile and divided. Ignorance again: they do not understand.
The force of environment, and especially the uses of education, are stamped upon our proverbs, are bedded deep in universal custom. "Knowledge is power," "As the twig is bent——" "He who touches pitch shall be defiled," "Evil communications corrupt good manners." And what educated parent would allow his children to grow up in ignorance, or would expose them to the evil influences of impure literature or bad companions.
Every church and chapel, every school and college, every book that teaches, every moral lesson, every chaperon and tutor, is an acknowledgment of the power of environment to wreck or save our young.
In practice we all fear or prize the influences of environment—upon ourselves, and upon those we love.
It is when we have to deal with the "Bottom Dog" that we ignore the facts which plead so strongly in his defence.
Of home influences it is hardly necessary to speak. The blessing of a wise and good mother; the disaster of an ignorant, vicious, or neglectful mother call for no reminder. The influence of husbands and wives upon each other; the transformation wrought by a fortunate or unfortunate love passion in the life of a woman or a man are equally obvious and well understood. So with friendship: most men have known at least one friend whose counsel, conversation, or example has affected the entire current of their thoughts—perhaps has changed the direction of their life. These instances being noted, it remains for us only to remember that the influence of a wife, a lover, a mother, or a friend may be as powerful for evil as for good.
But there are other personal influences as potent, but not so generally nor so wisely recognised. Such are the influences of good or bad books, and of great leaders and teachers—good and bad.
What tremendous powers over the lives and thoughts of millions were wielded by such teachers as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus Christ.
How vast a difference was wrought amongst the masses of humanity by Caesar, Mahomet, Alexander, Oliver Cromwell.
Who can estimate the importance to the world of Copernicus, Galileo; Luther, Calvin, Bacon, Darwin; of Rousseau, Wycliffe, Tyndall, Marx, Homer, Harvey, Watt, Caxton, and Stephenson?
Which of us can assess his debt to such men as Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, Dickens, and Carlyle?
Then consider our account with the scientists, priests, and lawgivers of Babylon and Egypt. Recall the benefits conferred upon us by the men who invented written language; the wheel, the file, the plough. Think of all the laborious and gradual building up of the arts, the ethics, the sciences of the world. The making of architecture, mathematics, sculpture, painting, agriculture, working in wood or metals; the evolution of literature and music, the invention and improvement of the many decencies, courtesies, and utilities of life; from the first wearing of loin cloths, the fashioning of flint axes, to the steel pen, the use of chloroform, and the custom of raising one's hat to a lady.
All the arts and crafts; the ethics, sciences, and laws; the tools, arms, grammars; the literatures, dramas, and newspapers; the conveniences and luxuries, the morals and the learning—all that goes to the making of modern civilization we owe to the genius, the industry, and the humanity of countless men and women whom we have never seen.
Into all the wealth of knowledge and freedom, of wisdom and virtue they created and bequeathed, we are born, as we are born to the light and the air. But for the labours and the sacrifices of the workers, fighters, and thinkers of the past we were shorn of all our pride and power, and reduced below the social, intellectual, and moral level of the Australian Bushmen.
And yet, to see the airs and graces of many educated and superior persons, one might suppose that they invented and discovered and developed all the knowledge and wisdom, all the virtues and the graces by which they benefit, of their own act and thought. One would suppose, to behold the scorn of these superior persons for their more rude and ignorant and unfortunate brothers and sisters, thattheyhad designed and tailored all the moral and intellectual finery in which they are arrayed. Whereas all their plumes are borrowed plumes; all they know they have been taught by other men; all they have has been made by other men; and they have become that which they are through the generosity and the tenderness of other men and women.
The rich young scholar fresh from Harvard or Cambridge is blessedly endowed with health, and strength and grammar, and mathematics, a sprinkle of dead languages, and more or less graceful manners. He despises the lout at the plough or the coster at the barrow because of their lack of the benefits given to him as a dole. He forgets that the University was there centuries before he was born, that Euclid, Lindley Murray, Dr. Johnson, Cicero, Plato, and a million other abler men than himself, forged every link of the chain of culture with which his proud young neck is adorned. He forgets that it is to others, and not to himself, that he owes all that makes him the man of whom he is so vain. He forgets that the coster at the barrow and the hind at the plough differ from him chiefly by the accident of birth, and that had they been nursed and taught and trained like himself they would have been as handsome, as active, as clever, as cultured, and very probably as conceited and unjust as he.
For all the mighty dead, and the noble works they have bequeathed us, and all the faithful living, and all the tender services they render us and the shielding love they bear us, are parts of our environment.
And for the blessings these good men and gentle women, with their golden heritage, have wrought in us, we are no more responsible and no more praiseworthy than we are for the flowers of the field, or the constellations in the sky, or the warmth of the beneficent sun that shines alike upon the sinner and the saint.
And since we are but debtors to the dead, but starvelings decked out by charity in the braveries made by other hands, and since we are deserving of no praise for our grandeur and our virtues, how shall we lift up our vainglorious and foolish faces to despise and contemn our less fortunate brothers and sisters, who have been made evil, even as we have been made good, who have been left uncouth and ignorant, even as we have been polished and instructed?
"But for the grace of God," said the tinker of Elstow—but for the graces of environment, say we—there, in the hangman's cart, in the felon's jacket, in the dunce's cap, in the beggar's rags, in the degradation of the drunkard or the misery of the degenerate weed of the slums—go We.