All of us can feel the point of those satirical lines; but some of us have yet to learn that a man can no more help being born "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dull," than he can help being born English, French, or Prooshian, or "even Italian."
Some of our ancestors conquered at Hastings, and some of them did not Some of our ancestors held the pass at Thermopylae, and others ran away at Bunker's Hill. Some were saints, and some were petty larcenists; some were philosophers, and some were pirates; some were knights and some were savages; some were gentle ladies, some were apes, and some were hogs. And we inherit from them all.
We are all of us great-great-grandchildren of the beasts. We carry the bestial attributes in our blood: some more, some less. Who amongst us is so pure and exalted that he has never been conscious of the bestial taint? Who amongst us has not fought with wild beasts—not at Ephesus, but in his own heart?
Some of our ancestors wore tails! Is it strange that some of our descendants should have what Winwood Reade called "tailed minds"? The ghosts of old tragedies haunt the gloomy vestibules of many human minds. The Bottom Dog may often be possessed of ancestral devils.
He that is without inherited taint among us, let him cast the first stone.
Sin is disobedience of the laws of God.
Crime is disobedience of the laws of men.
Vice is disobedience of the laws of nature.
I say that there is no such thing as a known law of God: that the so-called laws of God were made by men in God's name, and that therefore the word "sin" need trouble us no more. There is no such thing as sin.
I say that since there are bad laws as well as good laws, a crime may be a good instead of a bad act. For though it is wrong to disobey a good law, it may be right to disobey a bad law.
And now what do we mean by the words "good" and "bad," "moral" and "immoral"?
We call an act good when it "makes good"; when its effects are beneficial. We call an act bad when it "makes bad"; when its effects are injurious.
What are "morals"? My dictionary says, "the doctrine of man's moral duties and social relations"; and in Crabbe's Synonyms I find: "By an observance of good morals we become good members of society."
The italics are mine. Morals are the standard of social conduct. All immoral conduct is anti-social, and all anti-social conduct is immoral.
If there were only one man in the world he could not act immorally, for there would be no other person whom his acts could injure or offend.
Where two persons live together either may act immorally, for he may so act as to injure or offend his companion.
Any act is immoral and wrong which needlessly injures a fellow creature. But no act is immoral or wrong which does not directly or indirectly inflict needless injury upon any fellow creature.
I say, "needless injury"; for it may sometimes be right and necessary to injure a fellow creature.
If it is wrong to inflict needless injury upon our fellows, it is right to defend our fellows and ourselves from the attacks of those who would needlessly injure us.
Any act which inflicts "needless" injury upon a fellow creature is immoral; but no act which does not inflict needless injury upon a fellow creature is immoral.
That is the root of my moral code. It may at first seem insufficient, but I think it will be found to reach high enough, wide enough, and deep enough to cover all true morality. For there is hardly any act a man can perform which does not affect a fellow creature.
For instance, if a man takes to drink, or neglects his health, he injures others as well as himself. For he becomes a less agreeable and a less useful member of society. He takes more from the common stock, and gives back less. He may even become an eyesore, or a danger, or a burden to his fellows. A cricketer who drank, or neglected to practise, would be acting as immorally towards the rest of the team as he would if he fielded carelessly or batted selfishly. Because, speaking morally, a man belongs not only to himself, but also to the whole human race.
Morals do not come by revelation, but by evolution. Morals are not based upon the commands of God, but upon the nature and the needs of man. Our churches attribute the origin of morals to the Bible. But the Egyptians and Babylons had moral codes before Moses was born or the Bible written. Thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years before Abraham, there were civilisations and moral codes.
Even before the coming of man there were the beginnings of morals in the animal world.
When I was a boy, we were taught that acts were right or wrong as they were pleasing or displeasing to the God of the Hebrew Bible.
There were two kinds of men—good men and bad men. The good men might expect to succeed in business here and go to heaven hereafter. The bad men were in peril of financial frosts in this world, and of penal fires in the world to come.
As I grew older and began to think for myself, I broke from that teaching, and at last came to see that all acts were wrong which caused needless injury to others; that the best and happiest man was he who most earnestly devoted himself to making others happy; that all wrong-doing sprang from selfishness, and all welldoing from unselfishness; that all moral acts were social acts, and all immoral acts unsocial acts; and that therefore Socialism was good, and Individualism was evil.
But as to the beginning of the social virtues I was puzzled.
In most religions morality is supposed to have been established by divine revelation. Men did not know right from wrong until God gave them codes of laws ready-made; and even after men had the divine laws given to them they were by nature so depraved that they could only obey those laws by the special grace of God.
The idea that morality was slowly built up by evolution was first given to the world by Spencer and Darwin. It has since been elaborated by other writers, notably by Winwood Reade and Prince Kropotkin.
The notions of "the struggle for existence" and "the survival of the fittest" have been too commonly taken to mean that life in the animal world is one tragic series of ruthless single combats; that every man's hand always was and ever must be against the hand of every man, and every beast's tooth and claw against the tooth and claw of every beast.
But if we read Darwin's Descent of Man and Prince Kropotkin's Mutual Aid Among Animals and Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, we shall find that the law of natural selection does not favour any such horrible conclusions.
Self-preservation may be the first law of nature; but it is not the last law of nature. In union is strength. The gregarious animals—those which live in communities of flocks and herds—as the apes, the deer, the rooks, the bees, the bison, the swallows, and the wolves, gain by mutual aid in the struggle for existence, for, by reason of their numbers and their union, they are better able to watch for the approach and to defeat the attacks of their enemies.
From this union and mutual aid of the gregarious animals arose the social instincts.
The sociable animals would doubtless be first drawn together partly for safety and partly for company.
Sheep, deer, buffalo, wild dogs, ants, rooks, and other social animals enjoy the companionship of their own kind. They play together, feed together, sleep together, hunt together, and help each other to evade or resist their common foes. They share in social pleasures, and practise some of the social virtues.
And as the more sociable animals would be safest, and the less sociable animals most exposed to danger, natural selection would tend to raise the level of sociability, because the stock would be bred more from sociable than from unsociable animals.
The apes are social animals, and also imitative animals. The ape-like forbears of man would unite for safety and for society, and, being imitative, would observe and copy any invention or discovery due to lucky accident or to the sharper wits amongst their number.
Like the lower animals, they would play together, feed together, fight in companies, defend or rescue their young, and post sentinels to watch for the approach of danger.
Long before man had thought of any ghost or God, some rude form of order and morality would exist in the families and tribes of men, as some rude form of order and morality exists to-day amongst the wild elephants, the bees, the deer, and other creatures.
I once saw two horses fighting in a field. A third and older horse came up and parted them, and then drove them away in opposite directions. So in the earliest human tribes would the leaders prevent brawling and exact obedience.
Partly from such action, and partly from the training of the young, would be formed the habit of resenting and of punishing certain unsocial acts which the herd or tribe felt to be opposed to the general welfare.
One of the first faults man would brand as immoral would be cowardice. One of the earliest moral laws would, perhaps, resemble the Viking law that men who proved cowards in battle should be buried in the swamp under a hurdle.
Imitation, habit, natural selection, and the love of approbation, would all tend to fix and improve these crude customs, and from these simple beginnings would grow up laws and morals and conscience.
Very likely the earliest human groups were family groups, or clans. These clans would fight against other clans.
The next step may have been the union of clans into tribes, and the next the banding of tribes into nations.
At present men are mostly united as nations. Each nation has its own laws, its own morality, and its own patriotism, and the different nations are more or less hostile to each other; as formerly were the tribes or clans.
The final triumph will be the union of the nations in one brotherhood, and the abolition of war.
The red Indian does not think it immoral to murder an Indian of another tribe. The European does not think it immoral to kill thousands of men in battle. The evolution of morality has not yet carried us as far as universal peace. Nor has any revelation of God forbidden war.
We do not need to think long, nor to look far to see that different conditions have evolved different moral codes.
But all morals may be divided into two classes: True Morals and Artificial Morals.
True morals are all founded on the rule that it is wrong to cause needless injury to any fellow-creature.
Artificial morals are those morals invented by priests, kings, lawyers, poets, soldiers, and philosophers.
Moral codes made by rulers, or by ruling classes, are generally founded on expediency; and expediency, as understood by the rulers or the ruling classes, usually means those things that are expedient for themselves.
Now that which is expedient for a king, a tyrant, or an aristocracy may be far from expedient for the people over whom they rule. So we need not be surprised to find that many of the laws of barbarous and civilised nations are immoral laws. Our British game laws, land laws, poor laws, and very many of the criminal laws, and the laws relating to property, are immoral laws.
But there is no revelation of God condemning those laws. Nor does any European church oppose those laws, nor denounce them as immoral.
Then as to public opinion—our unwritten moral code—there is no clear and logical system of moral principles. For instance, the public think it a pity that men should be out of work, that women should starve, that little children should be sent to school unwashed and unfed. But the public do not think these things immoral. The fact is, the British people, after more than a thousand years of Christian teaching, do not know what true morality is. And how should they know, when their teachers in the church do not know?
The churches have always drawn their morality from the Bible, and have always tried to fit it in with the immoral codes made by kings, soldiers, landlords, money-lenders, and other immoral persons.
The Church has often pleaded for "charity" to the poor, but has never come to the rescue of the "Bottom Dog"; because the churches have never understood morality nor human nature.
It is science, and not the revelation of God, nor the teaching of priests, that has enabled us to begin to understand human nature, and has made it possible to build up a systematic code of true morality.
As to what morality is, I claim it is the rule of social conduct: the measure of right conduct between man and man; and I shall build up my whole case upon the simple moral rule that "every act is immoral which needlessly injures any fellow-creature." This rule is only an old truth in a new form. It is, indeed, just a modern reading of the "Golden Rule." It is not the rule itself, but the use I shall put it to, that is likely to flutter certain moral dovecotes. As to the rule, the teachings of most great moralists, of all times and nations, go to prove it. As, for instance:
Lao Tze, a Chinese moralist, before Confucius, said: "The good I would meet with goodness, the not-good I would also meet with goodness."
Confucius, Chinese moralist, said: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
He also said: "Benevolence is to be in one's most inward heart in sympathy with all things; to love all men; and to allow no selfish thoughts."
The same kind of teaching is found in the Buddhist books, and in the rock edicts of King Asoka. Here is a Buddhist precept, which has a special interest as touching the origin of morals.
"Since even animals can live together in mutual reverence, confidence, and courtesy, much more should you, O brethren, so let your light shine forth that you may be seen to dwell in like manner together."
The Hebrew moralists often sounded the same note. In Leviticus we find: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
In Proverbs: "If thine enemy be hungry give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty give him water to drink."
In the Talmud it is written: "Do not unto others that which it would be disagreeable to you to suffer yourself; that is the main part of the law."
We have the same idea expressed by Christ: "All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." Sextus, a teacher of Epictetus, said: "What you wish your neighbours to be to you, such be also to them."
Isocrates said: "Act towards others as you desire others to act towards you."
King Asoka said: "I consider the welfare of all people as something for which I must work."
In the Buddhist "Kathâ Sarit Sâgara" it is written: "Why should we cling to this perishable body? In the eye of the wise the only thing it is good for is to benefit one's fellow creatures." And another Buddhist author expresses the same idea with still more force and beauty: "Full of love for all things in the world, practising virtue in order to benefit others—this man alone is happy."
But even when the moralists did not lay down the "Golden Rule," they taught that the cause of sin and of suffering was selfishness; and they spoke strongly against self-pity, and self-love, and self-aggrandisement.
What is the lesson of Buddha, and of the Indian, Persian, and Greek moralists? Buddha went out into the world to search for the cause of human sin and sorrow. He found the cause to be self-indulgence and the cure to be self-conquest. "The cause of pain," he said, "is desire." And this lesson was repeated over and over again by Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch, and Seneca..
The moral is that selfishness is bad, and unselfishness is good. And this moral is backed by the almost universal practice of all men in all ages and of all races in testing or weighing the virtue or the value of any person's conduct.
What is the common assay for moral gold? The test of the motive. Sir Gorgio Midas has given £100,000 to found a Midas hospital. What says the man in the street? "Ah! fine advertisement for the Midas pills!" Mr. Queech, the grocer and churchwarden, has given £5 to the new Methodist Sunday School. "H'm!" says the cynical average man, "a sprat to catch a mackerel." Sir Norman Conquest, Bart, M.P., has made an eloquent speech in favour of old-age pensions. Chigwin, the incorruptible, remarks with a sniff that "it looks as if there would soon be a General Election."
What do these gibes mean? They mean that the benevolence of Messrs. Midas, Queech, and Conquest is inspired by selfishness, and therefore is not worthy, but base.
Now, when a gang of colliers go down a burning pit to save life, or when a sailor jumps overboard in a storm to save a drowning fireman, or when a Russian countess goes to Siberia for trying to free the Russian serfs, there is no sneer heard. Chigwin's fierce eye lights up, the man in the street nods approvingly, and the average man in the railway compartment observes sententiously:
"That's pluck."
Well. Is it not clear that these acts are approved and held good? And is it not clear that they are held to be good because they are felt to be unselfish?
Now, I make bold to say that in no case shall we find a man or woman honoured or praised by men when his conduct is believed to be selfish. It is always selfishness that men scorn. It is always self-sacrifice or unselfish service they admire. This shows us that deep in the universal heart the root idea of morality is social service. This is not a divine truth: it is a human truth.
Selfishness has come to be called "bad" because it injures the many without benefiting the one. Unselfishness has come to be called "good" because it brings benefit and pleasure to one and all. "It is twice bless'd: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes." As Marcus Aurelius expresses it: "That which is not for the interest of the whole swarm is not for the interest of a single bee." And again he puts it: "Mankind are under one common law; and if so they must be fellow-citizens, and belong to the same body politic. From whence it will follow that the whole world is but one commonwealth."
And Epictetus, the Greek slave, said that as "God is the father of all men, then all men are brothers."
For countless ages this notion of human brotherhood, and of the evil of self-love, has been to morality what the sap is to the tree. And now let us think once more how the notion first came into being.
I said that morality—which is the knowledge of good and evil—did not come by revelation from God, but by means of evolution. And I said that this idea was first put forth by Spencer and Darwin, and afterwards dealt with by other writers.
Darwin's idea was two-fold. He held that man inherited his social instincts (on which morality is built) from the lower animals; and he thought that very likely the origin of the social instinct in animals was the relation of the parents to their young. Let us first see what Darwin said.
In Chapter Four of The Descent of Man Darwin deals with "moral sense." After remarking that, so far as he knows, no one has approached the question exclusively from the side of natural history, Darwin goes on:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense, or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well, developed as in man.
For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, and feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them....
Every one must have noticed how miserable dogs, horses, sheep, etc., are when separated from their companions, and what strong mutual affection the two former kinds, at least, shown on their reunion....
All animals living in a body, which defend themselves or attack their enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one another; and those that follow a leader must be in some degree obedient. When the baboons in Abyssinia plunder a garden, they silently follow a leader, and if an imprudent young animal makes a noise, he receives a slap from the others to teach him silence and obedience....
With respect to the impulse which leads certain animals to associate together, and to aid one another in many ways, we may infer that in most cases they are impelled by the same sense of satisfaction or pleasure which they experience in performing other instinctive actions....
In however complex a manner this feeling (sympathy) may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection for those communities which included the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring....
Thus the social instincts, which must have been acquired by man in a very rude state, and probably even by his early apelike progenitors, still give the impulse to some of his best actions; but his actions are in a higher degree determined by the expressed wishes and judgment of his fellow-men, and unfortunately very often by his own strong selfish desires.
Those quotations should be enough to show Darwin's idea of the origin of the social, or moral, feelings. But I shall quote besides Haeckel's comment on Darwin's theory.
Speaking of the "Golden Rule" in his Confessions of Faith of a Man of Science, Haeckel says:
In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident; as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of apes and other social mammals; in a similar manner, but with wider scope, it was already present in the most primitive communities and among the hordes of the least advanced savages. Brotherly love—mutual support, succour, protection, and the like—had already made its appearance among gregarious animals as a social duty; for without it, the continued existence of such societies is impossible. Although at a later period, in the case of man, these moral foundations of society came to be much more highly developed, their oldest prehistoric source, as Darwin has shown, is to be sought in the social instincts of animals. Among the higher vertebrates (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.), the development of social relations and duties is the indispensable condition of their living together in orderly societies. Such societies have for man also been the most important instrument of intellectual and moral progress.
There is a very able article in the March, 1905, issue of the Nineteenth Century, by Prince Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid, on Darwin's theory of the origin of the moral sense, in which the striking suggestion is made that primitive man, besides inheriting from animals the social instinct, also copied from them the first rudiments of tribal union and mutual aid. This notion may be gathered from the following picturesque passages:
Primitive man lived in close intimacy with animals. With some of them he probably shared the shelters under the rocks, occasionally the caverns, and very often food....
Our primitive ancestors lived with the animals, in the midst of them. And as soon as they began to bring some order into their observations of nature, and to transmit them to posterity, the animals and their life supplied them with the chief materials for their unwritten encyclopaedia of knowledge, as well as for their wisdom, which they expressed in proverbs and sayings. Animal psychology was the first psychology man was aware of—it is still a favourite subject of talk at the camp fires; animal life, closely interwoven with that of man, was the subject of the very first rudiments of art, inspiring the first engravers and sculptors, and entering into the composition of the most ancient epical traditions and cosmogonic myths....
The first thing which our children learn in natural history is something about the beasts of prey—the lions and the tigers; But the first thing that primitive savages must have learned about nature was that it represents a vast agglomeration of animal clans and tribes; the ape tribe, so nearly related to man, the ever-prowling wolf tribe, the knowing, chattering bird tribe, the ever-busy insect tribe, and on. For them the animals were an extension of their own kin—only so much wiser than themselves. And the first vague generalisation which men must have made about nature—so vague as to hardly differ from a mere impression—was that the living being and his clan or tribe are inseparable. We can separate them—they could not; and it seems even doubtful whether they could think of life otherwise than within a clan or a tribe....
And that man who had witnessed once an attack of wild dogs, or dholes, upon the biggest beasts of prey, certainly realised, once and for ever, the irresistible force of the tribal unions, and the confidence and courage with which they inspire every individual. Man made divinities of these dogs, and worshipped them, trying by all sorts of magic to acquire their courage.
In the prairies and the woods our earliest ancestors saw myriads of animals, all living in clans and tribes. Countless herds of red deer, fallow deer, reindeer, gazelles, and antelopes, thousands of droves of buffaloes and legions of wild horses, wild donkeys, quaggas, zebras, and so on, were moving over the boundless plains, peacefully grazing side by side. Even the dreary plateaus had their herds of llamas and wild camels. And when man approached these animals, he soon realised how closely connected all these beings were in their respective droves or herds. Even when they seemed fully absorbed in grazing, and apparently took no notice of the others, they closely watched each other's movements, always ready to join in some common action. Man saw that all the deer tribe, whether they graze or merely gambol, always kept sentries, which never release their watchfulness and never are late to signal the approach of a beast of prey; he knew how, in case of a sudden attack, the males and the females would encircle their young ones and face the enemy, exposing their lives for the safety of the feeble ones; and how, even with such timid creatures as the antelopes, or the fallow deer, the old males would often sacrifice themselves in order to cover the retreat of the herd. Man knew all that, which we ignore or easily forget, and he repeated it in his tales, embellishing the acts of courage and self-sacrifice with his primitive poetry, or mimicking them in his religious tribal dances....
Social life—that is, we, not I—is, in the eyes of primitive man, the normal form of life. It is life itself. Therefore "we" must have been the normal form of thinking for primitive man: a "category" of his understanding, as Kant might have said. And not even "we," which is still too personal, because it represents a multiplication of the "I's," but rather such expression as "the men of the beaver tribe," "the kangaroo men," or "the turtles." This was the primitive form of thinking, which nature impressed upon the mind of man.
Here, in that identification, or, we might even say, in this absorption of the "I" by the tribe, lies the root of all ethical thought. The self-asserting "individual" came much later on. Even now, with the lower savages, the "individual" hardly exists at all. It is the tribe, with its hard-and-fast rules, superstitions, taboos, habits, and interests, which is always present in the mind of the child of nature. And in that constant, ever-present identification of the unit with the whole lies the substratum of all ethics, the germ out of which all the subsequent conceptions of justice, and the still higher conceptions of morality, grew up in the course of evolution.
Besides these excellent contributions to the subject, Prince Kropotkin gives us other new and striking thoughts, bearing upon the parental source of the social feelings indicated by Darwin. But first let us go back to Darwin. In Chapter Four of The De-scent of Man Darwin says:
The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents, and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to natural selection. With those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers.
Dr. Saleeby, in the Academy in the spring of 1905, had some interesting remarks upon the origin of altruism. He "finds in the breast of the mammalian mother the fount whence love has flowed," and points out that the higher we go in the mammalian scale the more dependent are the young upon their mothers.
After describing the helplessness of the human baby, he continues thus:
Yet, this is the creature which has spread over the earth so that he numbers some fifteen hundred millions to-day. He is the "lord of creation," master of creatures bigger, stronger, fleeter, longer-lived than himself. The earth is his and the fulness thereof. Yet without love not one single specimen of him has a chance of reaching maturity, or even surviving for a week. Verily love is the greatest thing in the world.
Well, upon this subject of the parental origin of altruism, Prince Kropotkin throws another light. First, alluding to Darwin's cautious handling of the subject of the maternal origin of social feelings, Prince Kropotkin, quotes Darwin's own remarkable comment, thus:
This caution was fully justified, because in other places he pointed out that the social instinct must be a separate instinct in itself, different from the others—an instinct which has been developed by natural selection for its own sake, as it was useful for the well-being and preservation of the species. It is so fundamental, that when it runs against another instinct, even one so strong as the attachment of the parents to their offspring, it often takes the upper hand. Birds, when the time has come for their autumn migration, will leave behind their tender young, not yet old enough for a prolonged flight, and follow their comrades.
He then offers the following suggestion:
To this striking illustration I may also add that the social instinct is strongly developed with many lower animals, such as the land-crabs, or the Molucca crab; as also with certain fishes, with whom it hardly could be considered as an extension of the filial or parental feelings. In these cases it appears rather an extension of the brotherly or sisterly relations or feelings of comradeship, which probably develop each time that a considerable number of young animals, having been hatched at a given place and at a given moment, continue to live together—whether they are with their parents or not. It would seem, therefore, more correct to consider the social and the parental instincts as two closely connected instincts, of which the former is perhaps the earlier, and therefore the stronger, and which both go hand in hand in the evolution of the animal world. Both are favoured by natural selection, which as soon as they come into conflict keeps the balance between the two, for the ultimate good of the species.
To sum up all these ideas. We find it suggested that the social feelings from which morality sprang, were partly inherited by man from his animal ancestors, partly imitated from observation of the animals he knew so well in his wild life.
And we find it suggested that these social feelings probably began in the love of animals for their young, and in the brotherhood and comradeship of the young for each other.
It was the social feelings of men that made their Bibles: the Bibles did not make the social feelings.
Morality is the result of evolution, not of revelation.
I HAVE spoken of the "nature" handed down to us by our fore-parents. I might have said "natures," for our inheritance, being not from one, but from many, is not simple, but compound.
We too commonly think of a man as an Englishman or a Frenchman; as a Londoner or a Yorkshireman; as good or bad.
We too commonly think of a man as one person, instead of as a mixture of many persons. As though John Smith were all John Smith, and always John Smith.
There is no such thing as an unmixed Englishman, Irishman, or Yorkshireman.
There is no such thing as an unmixed John Smith.
Englishmen are bred from the Ancient Briton, from the Roman, from the Piets and Scots, from the Saxons, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Normans, the French. All these varied and antagonistic bloods were mixed in centuries ago.
Since then the mixing has gone on, plentifully varied by intermarriage with Irish, Scots, Dutch, Germans, Belgians, French, Italians, Poles, and Spaniards. We have had refugees and immigrants from all parts of Europe. We have given homes to the Huguenots, and the Emigrés from France, to the Lollards and Lutherans from the Netherlands, to crowding fugitives from Russia, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Greece. We have absorbed these foreigners and taken them into our blood. And the descendants of all these mixed races are called Englishmen.
The Londoner is a mixture of all those races, and more. From every part of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales; from most parts of Europe, from many parts of America and Asia, and even Africa, streams of foreign blood have flowed in to make the Londoner.
In Yorkshire there are several distinct races, though none of them are pure. There is one Yorkshire type bearing marks of descent from the Norsemen, another bearing marks of descent from the Flemish and French immigrants, and another from the Normandy invaders. I have seen Vikings, Belgians, and Normans all playing cricket in the Yorkshire County team.
In Ireland there are Irishmen from Denmark and Norway, Irishmen from Ancient Mongolia, and, especially in Kerry, Irishmen who seem to be of almost pure Iberian type.
The Iberian Irishman is short, dark, aquiline, and sardonic, with black hair and eyes, and a moustache more like a Tartar's than a European's. The Viking Irishman is big and burly, with blue or grey eyes, and reddish hair and beard; the difference between these two types is as great as that between a Saxon and a Spaniard.
One of these Irish Iberians marries a Yorkshire Dane. Their son marries the daughter of a Lancashire Belgian and an Ancient Briton from Flint; and their children are English.
As I said just now, we think of John Smith as all John Smith and always John Smith.
But John is a mixture of millions of men and women, many of them as different from each other as John Ridd is different from Dick Swiveller, or as Diana of the Crossways is different from Betsy Trotwood. And these uncountable and conflicting natures are not extinct: they are alive and busy in the motley jumble we call John Smith.
John is not all John. He is, a great deal of him, Roman soldier, Ancient Briton, Viking pirate, Flemish weaver, Cornish fisherman, Lowland scholar, Irish grazier, London chorus girl, Yorkshire spinner, Welsh dairymaid, and a host of other gentle and simple, wild and tame, gay and grave, sweet and sour, fickle and constant, lovable and repellent ancestors; from his great-great-grandparent, the hairy treeman, with flat feet and club like a young larch, to his respectable father, the white-fronted, silk-hatted clerk in the Pudsey Penny Savings Bank.
And, being as he is, not all John Smith, but rather the knotted, crossed, and tangled mixture of Johns and Marys, and Smiths and Browns and Robinsons, that has been growing more dense and intricate for tens of thousands of years, how can we expect our good John to be always the same John?
We know John is many Johns in the course of a summer's day. We have seen him, possibly, skip back to the cave-man in a spasm of rage, glow with the tenderness of the French lady who died of the plague in the Fourteenth Century, and then smile the smile of the merry young soldier who was shot at Dettingen—all in the time it takes him to clench and unclench his hand, or to feel in his pocket for a penny, or to flash a glance at a pretty face in the crowd.
John Smith is not English, nor Yorkshire; but human. He is not one man; but many men, and, which counts for more, many women.
And how can we say of John Smith that he is "good" or "bad"? It is like saying of a bottle of beads, mixed of fifty colours, that it is red, or blue. As John's ancestors were made up of good and bad, and as he is made up of them, so John is good and bad in stripes or patches: is good and bad by turns.
We speak of these mixed natures which a man inherits from his fore-parents as his "disposition": we call them "the qualities of his mind," and we wonder when we find him inconsistent, changeable, undecided. Ought we to be surprised that the continual struggle for the mastery amongst so many alien natures leads to unlooked-for and unwished-for results?
Take the case of a council, a cabinet, a regiment, composed of antagonistic natures; what happens? There are disputes, confusion, contradictions, cross-purposes. Well: a man is like a crowd, a Parliament, a camp of ill-matched foreign allies. Indeed, he is a crowd—a crowd of alien and ill-sorted ancestors.
The Great Arteries of Human Nature
But, differ from each other as we may, there are some general qualities—some human qualities—common to most of us.
These common qualities may be split into two kinds, selfish and unselfish.
The selfish instincts come down to us from our earlier brute ancestors.
The unselfish instincts come down to us from our later brute ancestors, and from our human ancestors.
Amongst the strongest and the deepest of man's instincts are love of woman, love of children, love of pleasure, love of art, love of humanity, love of adventure, and love of praise.
I should say that the commonest and most lasting of all human passions is the love of praise: called by some "love of approbation."
From this great trunk impulse there spring many branches. Nearly all our vanities, ambitions, affectations, covetings, are born of our thirst for praise. It is largely in the hope of exciting the wonder or the admiration of our fellows that we toil and scramble and snatch and fight, for wealth, for power, for place; for masterly or daring achievement.
None but misers love money for its own sake. It is for what money will buy that men covet it; and the most desired of the things money will buy are power and display: the value of which lies in the astonishment they will create, and the flattery they will win.
How much meaning would remain to such proud and potent words as glory, riches, conquest, fame, hero, triumph, splendour, if they were bereft of the glamour of human wonder and applause?
What man will bear and do and suffer for love of woman, and woman for love of man; what both will sacrifice for the sake of their children; how the devotee of art and science, literature, or war, will cleave to the work of his choice; with what eagerness the adventurer will follow his darling bent, seeking in the ends of the earth for excitement, happy to gaze once more into the "bright eyes of danger"; with what cheerful steadfastness and unwearied self-denial benevolence will labour for the good of the race; is known to us all. What we should remember is that these and other powers of our nature act and react upon each other: that one impulse checks, or goads, or diverts another.
Thus the love of our fellows will often check or turn aside our love of ourselves. Often when the desire for praise beckons us the dread of blame calls us back again. The love of praise may even lure us towards an act, and baulk us of its performance: as when a cricketer sacrifices the applause of the crowd in order to win the praise of captain or critics.
So will the lust of pleasure struggle against the lust of fame; the love of woman against the love of art; the passion for adventure against the desire for wealth; and the victory will be to the stronger.
Let us look into the human heart (the best way is to look into our own) and see how these inherited qualities work for and against each other.
One of the strongest checks is fear; another is what we call conscience.
Fear springs sometimes from "love of approbation"; we shrink from an act from fear of being found out, which would mean the loss of that esteem we so prize. Or we shrink from fear of bodily pain: as those knew well who invented the terrors of hell-fire.
There is a great deal of most respectable virtue that ought to be called cowardice. Deprive virtue of its "dare nots," and how many "would nots" and "should nots" might survive? Good conduct may not mean the presence of virtue, but the lack of courage, or desire.
But, happily, men do right, also, for right's sake; and because it is right; or they refrain from doing wrong because it is wrong.
The bent towards right conduct arises from one of two sources:
1. Education: we have been taught that certain acts are wrong.
2. Natural benevolence: a dislike to injure others.
The first of these—education—has to do with "environment"; the second is part of heredity. One we get from our fellow-men, the other from our ancestors.
Here let us pause to look into that much-preached-of "mystery" of the "dual consciousness," or "double-self."
We all know that men often do things which they know to be wrong. When we halt between the desire to do a thing, and the feeling that we ought not to do it, we seem to have two minds within us, and these two minds dispute about the decision.
What is this "mysterious" double-self? It is nothing but the contest between heredity and environment; and is not mysterious at all.
Heredity is very old. It reaches back, to the beasts. It passes on to us, generation after generation, for millions of years, certain instincts, impulses, or desires of the beast.
Environment is new. It begins at the cradle. It prints upon us certain lessons of right and wrong. It tells us that we ought not to do certain things.
But the desire to do those things is part of our heredity. It is in our blood. It is persistent, turbulent, powerful. It rises up suddenly, with a glare and a snarl, like a wild beast in its lair. And at the sound of its roar, and the flame of its lambent eyes, and the feel of its fiery breath, memory lifts its voice and hand, and repeats the well-learned lesson with its "shall-nots."
We are told that the animal impulses dwell in the "hind brain," and that morals and thought dwell in the "fore brain." The "dual personality," then, the "double-self," consists of the two halves of the brain; and the dispute between passion and reason, or between desire and morality, is a conflict between the lower man and the higher; between the old Adam and the new.
But it is also, to a great extent, a conflict between the average man and the hero, or leader.
We inherit the roots of morality, that is ta say, the "social instincts," or impulses of unselfish thoughts for others, from the sociable animals. But what we call "ethics," the rules or laws of moral conduct, have been slowly built up by human teachers. These teachers have been men with a special genius for morals. They have made codes of morals higher than the nature of the average man can reach.
But the average man has been taught these codes of morals in his childhood, and has grown up in unquestioning respect for them.
So when his baser nature prompts him to an act, and his memory repeats the moral lesson it has learnt, we have the nature of the average man confronted by the teaching of the superior or more highly moral man.
And there is naturally a conflict between the desire to do evil, and the knowledge of what things are good. It is not easy for Wat Tyler, Corporal Trim, or Sir John Falstaff to follow the moral lines laid down by such men as Buddha, Seneca, or Socrates. Sir John knows the value of temperance; but he has a potent love of sack. Wat knows that it is good for a man to govern his temper; but he is a choleric subject, and "hefty" with a hammer. There was a lot of human nature in the shipwright, who being reminded that St. Paul said a man was better single, retorted that "St. Paul wasn't a North Shields man."
We know very well that some qualities may make either for good or bad. Strength, ability, courage, emulation, may go to the making of a great hero, or a great criminal..
If a man's bent, or teaching, be good, he will do better, if it be evil he will do worse by reason of his talents, his daring, or his resolution.
Dirt has been defined as "matter in the wrong place": badness might be often defined as goodness misapplied. Courage ill-directed is foolhardiness; caution in excess is cowardice; firmness overstrained is obstinacy.
Many of our inherited qualities are what we call "potentialities": they are "possibilities," capabilities, strong, or potential for good or evil.
Love of praise may drive a man to seek fame as a philanthropist, a tyrant, a discoverer, or a train-robber.
Love of adventure and love of fame had as much to do with the exploits of Gaude Duval and Morgan, the buccaneer, as with those of Drake or Clive.
Nelson was as keen for fame as Buonaparte: but the Englishman loved his country; the Corsican himself.
Doubtless Torquemada had as much religious zeal as St. Francis; but the one breathed curses, the other blessings.
Pugnacity is good when used against tyranny or wrong; it is bad when used against liberty or right.
Men of brilliant parts have failed for lack of industry or judgment. Men of noble qualities have gone to ruin because of some inborn weakness, or bias towards vice. Our minds "are of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." Many of life's most tragic human failures have been "sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh." Ophelia was not the first woman, nor the last by many millions, to perish through reaching for flowers that grow aslant the brook. If virtue is often cowardice, frailty is often love; and the words of Laertes to the "churlish priest" might frequently be spoken for some poor "Bottom Dog" in reproach of the unjust censure of a Pharisee: "a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling."
We must remember, then, that the happiness or unhappiness of our nature depends not so much upon any special quality as upon the general balance of the whole.
Poor Oscar Wilde had many fine qualities, but his egotism, his vicious taint, and, perhaps, his unfortunate surroundings, drove him to shipwreck, with all his golden talents aboard. Every day noble ships run upon the rocks; every day brave pennons go down in the press of the battle, and are trampled in the blood and dust; every day lackeys ride in triumph, and princes slave on the galleys; every day the sweet buds go to the swine-trough, and the gay and fair young children to shame or the jail.
Some fall through loving too much, others through loving not at all. Some are shattered by a single fault, like a ruby cup with one flaw in its radiant heart. Some are twisted out of all hope from birth, like one of Omar's pots, which the potter moulded awry. Some seeds of innocent lilies, or roses of loveliness, or passion flowers divine, are scattered upon the rocks, or blown by harsh winds out to sea.
Do you know Thomas Carlyle's burning words concerning these tragic fates?
Cholera doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and despair, they, rushing about all day, from lane to lane, with their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which is a much more rugged one than Howard's. O, what say we, Cholera Doctors? Ragged losels, gathered by beat of drum from the over-crowded streets of cities, and drilled a little, and dressed in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable manner; and handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate of a shilling per day? Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials—O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and three-fold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result. That they lie yet unelaborated and stagnant in the souls of widespread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue! A Mrs. Manning "dying game"—alas, is not that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too? Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of Gracchi now, but a hideous murderess, fit to be mother of hyenas! To such extent can potentialities be foiled.
Let us bear in mind, then, that a man's powers, like the powers of a state, will work for good or for evil, as they are ill or well governed.
And the government of human powers and desires depends partly upon heredity, and largely upon environment, of which in its due place.
How Does Heredity Make Genius?
I shall not weary the reader with proofs of heredity. It would be a waste of words to quote pages of Darwin, Spencer, Weissmann, and Galton for the sake of proving the obvious. Our own observation and common sense will convince us that our traits and qualities of body and mind are inherited.
We know that rabbits do not breed kittens, nor eagles geese, nor apples oranges, nor negroes whites. We know that in all cases where the breed is pure the descent is pure; and we understand that where a black sheep is born into a white flock, or a fair child is born of dark fore-parents, the "sport," as it is called, is due to atavism, or breeding back. Somewhere, near or far, the breed has been "crossed."
But there is one question that has caused a good deal of doubt and perplexity, and, as the answer to that question is not obvious, we will consider it here.
A "sport" is "an individual departure from a type." A sport is a "freak of nature." A genius is a "sport"; and the question we are to answer here is:
How does heredity account for genius?
To make the matter quite clear, and to meet all doubts, we will split our question into two:
1. How is it that genius does not always beget genius?
2. How is it mediocrity does sometimes beget genius?
Take the first question. How is it that genius does not always beget genius? Mr. Galton has disposed of the objection that clever men do not have clever sons by showing that clever men often do have clever sons.
But the fact remains that such men as Shakespeare, Plato, Cæsar, and Socrates never have children as great as themselves.
And it has been claimed that this fact belies heredity.
But to those who know even a very little about heredity it is quite obvious that we ought not to expect the son of a very great genius to be equal to his father.
Such a recurrence is rendered almost impossible by the law of variation.
A great man is a lucky product of heredity and environment. He is a fortunate, and accidental, blending of several qualities which make greatness possible.
But the great man's son is not born of the same parents as his father. His blood is only half of it drawn from the families which produced his father's greatness; the other half is from another family, which may contain no elements of greatness.
Thus so far from its being strange that genius does not beget genius, we see that it would be strange if genius did beget genius.
The children of Shakespeare would not be Shakespeareans: they would be half Shakespeare and half Hathaway; and it is quite possible that their intellectual qualities might come chiefly from the mother's side.
Now, if Ann Hathaway's family were not intellectually equal to Shakespeare's family, how could we expect the children of those two to be equal to the child of the superior breed?
We should not expect a mixture of wine and water to be all wine; nor the foal of a blood horse and a half-bred mare to be a thoroughbred horse. So much for the first question. Those who ask such a question have lost sight of the law of variation.
Now for the second question. How is it that mediocrity breeds genius? The answer to that is that mediocrity does not breed genius.
Let us take a case that is often cited: the case of the great musician, Handel.
George Frederick Handel was a musical genius; and we are told that heredity does not account for his genius, as no other member of his family had ever displayed any special musical talent. Whence, then, did Handel get his musical genius? What are the qualities that go to the making of a great composer?
First, an exquisite ear; that implies great gifts of time and tune. Second, a great imagination. Third, an "infinite capacity for taking pains." Fourth, a quick and sensitive nervous system.
Now, a man might possess great industry, or ambition, and sensitive nerves, and not be an artist of any kind.
He might have a great imagination, and lack the industry or the ambition to use it effectively.
He might have industry, ambition, sensitive nerves, and great imagination, and yet without the musical ear he would never be a musician.
And the same may be said of any one or more of his ancestors.
Therefore, there may have been amongst Handel's foreparents all the qualities needed for the making of a great musician without those qualities ever happening to be united in one person.
Let us suppose a case. A man of energy and ambition, but with average imagination, and an average ear, marries a woman of ordinary mind. Their son marries a woman of strong imagination. The child of this second, union marries a woman of refined nature and considerable imagination. The son of this union may be ambitious, imaginative, and energetic, for he may inherit all those qualities from his foreparents.
Then the only trait left to be accounted for is the fine musical ear.
Now that gift for music may have come down to him from some distant foreparent, living in an age when such a quality had no outlet. Or it may have come down to him from some foreparent who lacked ambition or energy to use it in a striking way.
It happens very often that a son inherits his finest intellectual and emotional qualities from his mother.
And we know that a talent of any kind is more likely to lie dormant in a woman than in a man. For the woman may spend all her time and attention upon her home, her husband, her children.
I knew a case in which two sisters possessed considerable artistic talent Yet, so far as anyone knew, none of their foreparents had shown artistic ability. But one of the sisters told me that her mother had a remarkable gift for drawing, which she had never used, "except to amuse her children."
Now, when we come to look into the case of Handel, we find that his father's family never gave any sign of musical talent But of his mother's family, and of the families of his grandmother and great-grandmother we know little.
But Handel's father was ambitious and energetic, and his mother is described as follows:
The mother was thirty-three years old, and, we are told, was "clear-minded, of strong piety, with a great knowledge of the Bible... a capable manager, earnest, and of pleasant manners."
Is there any proof that Handel's mother had not a good musical ear? None. Is there any proof that she had not, lying dormant, some special gift for music, inherited from some ancestor? None.
In that day, and in that part of Germany, music was set little store by, and musicians were regarded much as actors were in England. Therefore any great musical gift which happened to be inherited by a woman would have small chance of being developed or used. And it is quite possible that Handel may have inherited his ear from his mother's family.
Again, the musical talent may have been a quality that had been improving by marriage for several generations. Or it may have been an accident, due to some physical process about which we cannot possibly have any direct knowledge.
For instance, just as some special excellence of some special organ may be handed down, so may some special defect A child may inherit the defect, or the excellence. Or he may inherit a talent from both parents, and so may excel them both.
A man may inherit his genius piecemeal from a hundred ancestors, some of them dead for centuries, or he may owe his special brilliance to some excitement, or even to some derangement of the nervous system. In fact, to what Lombroso calls "degeneracy." He may be like a river, fed by several ancestral streams. He may be the descendant of some "mute inglorious Milton." But one thing he is not—he is not a "mystery." There is nothing in his greatness more mysterious than the accumulation of money in a bank, or the agrandisement of a river by its tributary streams, or the sudden appearance of a pattern of unusual beauty in a kaleidoscope.
There is nothing in genius to belie heredity. There is nothing in genius that cannot be accounted for by heredity—if we remember the laws of variation, and of atavism, or breeding back.
Speaking strictly, there are no "born criminals"; but there are some unfortunate creatures born with a nature prone to crime, just as there are others born with a nature prone to disease.
These "born criminals," regarded by their better-endowed or luckier brothers and sisters as "wicked," are the victims of "atavism" or of "degeneracy."
They are as much to be pitied, and as little to be blamed, as those born with a liability to insanity or consumption.
Atavism, as we have seen, is a reversion to an older and a lower type, a "breeding back," in some points, to the savage or the brute.
"Degeneracy" is the inherited result of vice, insanity, or disease in the parent Lombroso describes degeneracy as "the action of heredity in the children of the inebriate, the syphilitic, the insane, the consumptive, etc.; or of accidental causes, such as lesions of the head, or the action of mercury, which profoundly change the tissues, perpetuates neuroses or other diseases in the patient, and, which is worse, aggravates them in his descendants."
The atavist is a man born with the nature, or some of the traits of bestial or savage ancestors. He is bred back to the type that was before morals. He is born with strong animal traits, with few social qualities; with little or no moral brain. He is a modern child, born with the passions, or the appetites, or the intelligence, of an ape, or a cave-man. To expect him to rise to the moral standard of to-day, and to blame him if he fail, is as unreasonable as it would be to expect the same conduct from a gorilla, or a panther.
If the atavist is "wicked," the shark, and the wolf, and the adder are "wicked."
To say that the atavistic man has "reason" is no answer; he has not the kind of reason that makes for peace and order. His misfortune just lies in the fact that he is "bred back" to the kind of reason which, amongst the cave-men, perhaps, made a man a leader, or a hero, but amongst civilised Western people makes him a "born criminal."
I said before, that to blame a Spaniard for being proud is to blame him for being born of Spanish parents. It is just as true to say that to blame a man for being a "born criminal" is to blame him because some of his baser ancestors have accidentally passed on to him the traits of their lower natures.
Indeed, it is plainly absurd to blame a man for being "born" anything, since he had no hand nor part in his birth.
All we can do with regard to the "born criminal" is to pity him for his unhappy inheritance, and try to make the best of him. So far we have never tried to make the best of him; but have usually made almost the worst of him, by meeting his hate with our hate, his ignorance with our ignorance, his ferocity with our ferocity. Nature, or God, having cursed the poor wretch with a heritage of shame, we have come forward, in the name of humanity and justice, to punish and execrate him for his fatal mischoice of ancestors. It is as though we should flog a gorilla or a hyæna for having wickedly refused to be born a Canon of St. Paul's, or a Primitive Methodist Sunday school teacher.
But some will suppose that the "born criminal" might be a sober, law-abiding, and God-fearing man, "if he would try"; and they do not understand that the man with the atavistic brain cannot try.
He has not got the kind of brain that can try to be what we think he ought to be. We do not expect the bear to "try" to be polite, nor the hog to "try" to be cleanly. We know they cannot try to be either of those things. Neither can the atavistic man try to be something for which his nature was not made.
What is sauce for the atavist is sauce for the degenerate. He also is the victim of cruel fate. He also inherits misfortune, or shame, or disaster from his fathers. His nature is not a casting back to an ancient type: it is a nature poisoned, maimed, perverted, or spoiled through the vices or the diseases of those who brought him into the world.
The degenerate may inherit from a diseased or drunken parent an imperfect mind or an imperfect body. He may be born with a weak moral sense, or with weak lungs, or with an ill-balanced brain.
Proneness to crime or proneness to disease may be born in him through no fault of his own. The cause is the same in both cases: the vice or disease of a parent.
Now it is certain that we do not blame, but pity, and that we do not punish but help the victim whose degeneracy takes the form of disease. But we do blame and we do punish the victim whose degeneracy takes the form of immorality or crime.
In neither case is the degeneracy the fault of the degenerate: in both cases it is handed down to him by his parent or parents. Yet in the one case he gets our sympathy, and in the other case our censure.
There is neither justice nor reason in such treatment of those who have the misfortune to be born—in the true sense of the words—of "unsound mind."
Those who have made a scientific study of crime tell us that "psychic atavism is the dominant characteristic of the born criminal."
What is "psychic atavism"? It is a breeding back, or "casting back" to a lower type of mind. This atavistic mind is inherited by the "born criminal" just as certain "muscles common to apes" are inherited by some other men.
And we are told that this inherited atavistic mind is "the dominant characteristic of the criminal born." In other words, those men whom we have always blamed and punished as exceptionally "wicked," have inherited an atavistic, or criminal, mind from ancestors who died millions of years ago. The most noticeable and striking fact about the born criminal is his unfortunate inheritance of that atavistic mind.
And in the plenitude of our wisdom and the glow of our righteous wrath, we hang a man, or flog him, or brand him, or loathe him, because a cruel fate has visited upon him an affliction more pitiable than blindness, or lameness, or paralysis, or consumption.
In cases of psychic atavism the actual form of the brain, or the skull, is more or less like that of the older and lower type to which the luckless atavist has been cast back. The skull of the "born criminal" is the skull of the ape-man, or the cave-man. It has a low and retreating forehead, a heavy and square jaw, and is large behind, where the baser animal parts of the brain are placed.
Now, to expect the same morals and the same intelligence from a man cursed with the skull of a gorilla, or the brain of a wild hog, as from the man blest with the skull and brain of a Socrates or a Shakespeare, is like expecting figs to grow upon thistles, or fish to breathe without gills.
And to blame a man for the shape of his skull, or the balance of his brain, is as foolish as to blame him because he has no eye for colour or no ear for music, or because his "having in beard is as a younger brother's revenue."
Speaking on this subject in his excellent book, "The Diseases of Society," Dr. Lydston, Professor of Criminal Anthropology, who is a well-known authority in America, says:
Atavism, or reversion of type, is a most important phase of the relation of evolutionary law to criminal and vice tendencies.... Reversion of type may be psychic (mental) or physical or both.
Whether associated with obvious physical reversions or not, psychic atavism is the dominant characteristic of the criminal. It is certainly the principal phenomenon involved in the study of the crime question, because it constitutes the dynamics of crime. The outcropping of ancestral types of mentality is observed to underlie many of the manifestations of vice and crime. These ancestral types or traits may revert farther back even than the savage progenitors of civilised man, and approximate those of the lower animals who, in turn, stand behind the savage in the line of descent....
Lombroso assigns to atavism a position of pre-eminence in the etiology of crime. In effect he thinks that crime is a return to primitive and barbarous ancestral conditions, the criminal being practically a savage, born later than his day. Obviously this view fits very accurately the so-called born criminal, comprising about one-tenth of the entire criminal population.
But what of the other victims of heredity: the criminal, or immoral "degenerate"? Let us take a few facts, and see what they will teach us.
Dr. Lydston testifies as follows:
Rev. O. McCulloch has traced the life histories of seventeen hundred and fifty degenerate criminal and pauper descendants of one "Ben Ishmael," who lived in Kentucky in 1790.
The Rev. Dr. Stocker, of Berlin, traced eight hundred and thirty-four descendants of two sisters, who lived in 1825. Among them were seventy-six who had served one hundred and sixteen years in prison, one hundred and sixty-four prostitutes, one hundred and six illegitimate children, seventeen pimps, one hundred and forty-two beggars, and sixty-four paupers.
It has been estimated by Sichart, Director of Prisons in Wurtemburg, that over twenty-five per cent, of the German prison population comes from a degenerate ancestry. Vergilis claims thirty-two per cent, for Italian criminals.
Now, bearing in mind that the unfortunate children of drunken, diseased, criminal, vicious, and insane parents may, and in very many cases will, either become criminal or immoral, or, becoming imbecile or diseased, will breed other degenerate children who will become criminal or immoral, let us consider the following plain facts taken from a London daily paper of the present year (1905).
It is estimated that there are 50,000 epileptic children in the United Kingdom, and that one child in every 100 of the population is feeble-minded.
In the last few years special schools have been opened for these children, and they are trained until they are sixteen years of age. At that age they are turned out into the world. A few are able to look after themselves. The majority drift into imbecility and vice, and flood the workhouses and prisons.
At a meeting in the Guildhall, London, called to discuss the means of dealing with imbeciles and epileptics, a speech was made by Dr. Potts, of Birmingham, of which the following is a condensed report, cut by me from the Daily Express: