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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?

CHAPTER SIX – ENVIRONMENT

|WHAT is environment?

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 be taught to 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 never could "know better," unless some person taught him 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 unless taught good 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.

MORALS AND DISEASE

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, in The 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 the fons origo of 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 are not developed, 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 from The 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, in The 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:

WOMEN IN THE METROPOLIS OF THE WORLD

"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?