THERE are many who always think of environment as something bad.
We hear a good deal about men who "rise above their environment"; but we
seldom hear of men who are uplifted by their environment.
Yet, as I have shown, no man rises above bad environment unless he is
helped by good environment.
Those who dread the power of environment cannot have given much thought
to the subject.
Instead of being a menace to the human race, the power of environment is
the source of our brightest hope.
Environment has shaped evolution, and has raised man above the beasts.
Environment has created morality and conscience.
Environment, feared as a power for evil, is also a power for good. If
bad teaching, and evil surroundings make bad men; then good teaching,
and good surroundings will make good men.
If bad food, bad air, ignorance, and vice, degrade mankind; then good
food, good air, knowledge, and temperance will uplift mankind.
If men and women are largely that which environment makes them, then, by
improving the environment we can improve men and women.
And here I come into touch with a certain school of dismal scientists
who would have us believe that it is useless to improve environment,
because men are what heredity makes them, and because we cannot control
heredity.
Let us dispose of these pessimists before we go any farther. Happily,
the cases in which heredity is stronger than environment are few.
Environment cannot make a model citizen of the "born criminal," or
atavist. But good environment will make the worst man better than he
would be under bad environment.
Environment cannot make a genius. No amount of feeding, training, and
teaching will make an average man into a Shakespeare, or a Plato.
But good environment will do more for the dullest of men than bad
environment will do.
Environment cannot prevent atavism. It may happen that the best of stock
will "breed back" to a lower type. It may happen that a criminal or an
incapable will crop out suddenly in a line of good and intelligent men
and women. But good environment will abolish degeneracy, as certainly as
bad environment will cause it.
For the occasional genius we need feel no concern. He will come when
heredity produces him; and he is welcome. And for the atavist, or "born
criminal," we may be thankful that he is comparatively rare, and may
content ourselves with doing the best we can with him, in future,
instead of the worst, as heretofore.
I am assuming that the worst type of born criminal is quite hopeless;
but I am not sure of that. We can tame wild beasts, and why not wild
men?
But the dismal scientists will tell us that even good environment
cannot improve the race, because "acquired characteristics cannot be
transmitted": which is to say that knowledge cannot be handed down
hereditarily from father to son, and that, therefore, all that the best
environment can do is to begin at the beginning with each generation, to
teach and train them.
I deny that, and will give my reasons. But suppose we admit it. What
follows?
Is it not better to teach and to train each generation well, than to
teach and train them ill?
If mental and physical culture cannot be handed down; if the children
of the educated and the well-developed must be born uneducated and
undeveloped, is it not better to have a generation of strong and
cultured men and women than a generation of degenerate weeds? Because
we cannot, by education, raise a breed of Washingtons and Darwins, and
Miltons and Nelsons, are we to content ourselves with a population of
hooligans and boors?
If environment cannot permanently improve the breed, is that any reason
for making the worst, instead of the best, of the breed we now possess?
And now, as to that question of improving the breed, I claim that
environment would improve the breed, and would improve it as it has
improved it in the past, by "natural selection."
How do cattle-breeders improve their stock? By breeding from the best
animals, and not from the worst.
Men of weak or base moral natures, and men of weak minds and bodies
will, I believe, generally reproduce their faults in their descendants.
But, to marry, they must find wives.
I said a little way back, "take care of your women, and the race will
take care of itself."
Good environment would "take care of the women." The women being
properly nursed, fed, taught, and honoured, would select partners who
would not shock them morally, nor disgust them physically.
Virtuous, refined, and intelligent women do not, in general--there
are exceptions--love and marry men of weak minds, nor men of diseased
bodies, nor men of low moral type.
Therefore, given proper environment, the "born criminal" and the mental
weakling would not be able to find wives. But that is not the only
way in which good environment would affect the breed. Nearly all
degeneration is caused by bad environment, and good environment would
stop degeneration, and by that means would improve the mental, moral,
and physical average.
It has been suggested, by some of the most dismal scientists, that to
prevent the spread of degeneration we should prevent degenerates from
marrying. But I think a sounder method would be to stop the production
of degenerates, by abolishing the environment that produces them.
As to the atavist, or "born criminal," I would point out that one of the
laws of heredity is the tendency to "revert to the normal." That is
to say, genius and atavism do not "persist." In a few generations the
atavist and the genius have bred back to the average level.
That, as I have pointed out, is due to the mixture of blood by marriage.
Thanks to this law, even the "born criminal" cannot often reappear. An
example of the working of this law is afforded by the descendants of the
Australian convicts, who have turned out excellent men and women.
I think, then, that we need not be seriously troubled by the gloomy
forebodings of our pessimists. With bad environment human nature has no
chance: with good environment human nature will take care of itself.
And now let us look at some of the facts in proof of the magical results
of improved environment.
I have before me a newspaper report of an interview with Mr. George
Jackson, secretary of the Middlemore Children's Emigration Homes. This
society was founded some thirty years ago, and has since sent out to
Canada more than three thousand children from the slums.
The children came from the worst of slums, and from the worst of homes.
They are spoken of by the reporter as being rescued from homes "where
they are in daily contact with grinding poverty and misery, in an
atmosphere of moral and physical foulness, with parents who are drunken,
criminal, and inhuman." And of these three thousand waifs _not two in a
hundred turned out badly_.
To give an idea of the working of a changed environment in the case of
these children, I will quote from the report of the _Birmingham Daily
Post_:
Mr. Jackson's view ranges over some three thousand children of both
sexes rescued from the very lowest haunts of misery and vice, picked up
forlorn and deserted from the gutters of Birmingham, snatched from the
evil influence of parents who had carried active cruelty or passive
neglect to such terrible lengths that the retributive hand of human law
had at last fallen upon them, from parents who would have deliberately
forced their offspring to mendicancy, to thievery, or to prostitution.
These three thousand worse than destitute little ones, these infants
"crying in the night, and with no language but a cry." who had started
their sad lives on the very threshold of that dark door over which is
written, "All hope abandon," were rescued by kindly hands and carried
into the sunshine. For a time they were fed, and clothed, and
schooled, taught that there was something more in life than squalor and
selfishness and vice, and then they were taken thousands of miles away
from those foul slums in which their eyes had first opened to the murky
light, their tender sensibilities first awakened to the bitter lesson
of human pain and misery. They were taken to where God's fresh, free air
sweeps across leagues of virgin forest and prairie, to where existence
is vigorous, it may be, but healthy, and pure, and invigorating, to
where conditions are such as to develop strong, self-reliant manhood,
instead of debased and neurotic criminality. It was in the complete and
sweeping character of the change that lay the wisdom of the scheme. On
the lone backwood farmstead of Canada the slum child had no opportunity,
even had he wished, of once more coming within the range of vicious
influences such as he had left. There was no temptation to many of the
vices with which cruel circumstances had made him so terribly familiar.
Heredity of evil was cheated of its chances, and whatever tendencies
to good remained were fostered and given full scope for development.
Further, the degraded relatives were no longer able to act the part of
a millstone around the child's neck, to fetter his every aspiration to
a better life, to drag him down or keep him down to their own dark
state.... Hundreds upon hundreds of prosperous farmers in Canada at this
day can look back to the dim past, when they sold matches or papers, or
picked up as best they could, in the streets of Birmingham, a few stray
coppers to take home to their dissolute parents; to the time when,
with empty stomachs and with the rain and snow beating through ragged
garments onto their little pinched bodies, they cried through the
rigours of winter nights on a sheltered doorstep rather than face the
blows and curses which awaited them in the only place which they could
call home. They were born to poverty and crime "as the sparks fly
upward," and they have lived to thank God for that kindly agency which
rescued them from their inheritance of misery.
Of these three thousand children two thousand nine hundred and forty
were saved--by a change of environment. Had the environment been left
unchanged probably not 2 per cent, would have escaped ruin. As their
parents were, so would they have been. Had their parents been rescued in
_their_ youth only 2 percent of them would have failed.
The experience of Dr. Bamado and his friends with the children taken
from the slums was very similar. The percentage of failures was small,
and the London papers, in their obituaries of the good doctor, speak
enthusiastically of the value of his work, and say that thousands of
children rescued by him and his agents "are now steady and prosperous
citizens beyond the seas." Since Dr. Bamado took up the work over
fifty-five thousand children have been saved--by changed environment.
From an article by Mr. R. B. Suthers in the _Clarion_ of August, 1904,
I quote the following account of the George Junior Republic, an American
institution, founded by Mr. William R. George, in 1896.
The Junior Republic is a collection of 100 hooligans, juvenile
criminals, and unfortunate boys and girls who live under a constitution
based on that of the United States. The government is government of the
citizens, for the citizens, and by the citizens. Children of all ages
are admitted, but the rights of citizenship are not granted to those
under 12, and at 21 the juniors are drafted into the great republic
outside. Schooling is compulsory up to the age of 16, after which the
citizen has the choice of many trades, in the Junior Republic, including
farming, carpentering, printing, dairying, or he may be a cook, waiter,
store keeper, or office boy. The girls may go in for dressmaking,
cooking, and laundry work.
These boys and girls, recruited from the slums and the criminal forcing
beds of the great cities, _govern_ themselves. They make their own laws,
appoint their own officials, run their own gaol, and are practically
as free as the citizens of the big republic of which they become
full-fledged members when grown up.
Mr. George asserts that he has never known them when administering the
law, to give an unjust or foolish decision.
Remember they were hooligans, criminals, and wastrels.
It ought not to be necessary to argue that children well brought up will
turn out better than children ill brought up. We all know that such must
be the case: we all see every day of our lives that, such is the case:
we all _know_ the power of environment for good as well as for evil. But
facts are stubborn things, and the above are stubborn facts.
I have hitherto dealt almost wholly with the environment of the poor,
but it is needful also to say something as to the environment of the
rich, as Mr. Chesterton's mistakes have shown.
The chief evils of the environment of the rich are wealth, luxury,
idleness, and false ideals.
It is not healthy for young people to be brought up to do nothing but
spend money and hunt for excitement. It is not good for young or old to
have unlimited wealth and leisure. It is not good for men, nor women,
nor children, to be flattered and fawned upon. Flunkeyism and slavery
degrade and debase the master as well as the servant: the snob lord, as
well as the snob lackey.
We have hundreds of religions in the world; but how many teachers of
true morality? True morality condemns all forms of selfishness, all acts
that are hurtful to our neighbours, to the commonwealth, to the race.
In the light of true morality, a rich landowner, or a millionaire
money-lender, is a greater criminal than a burglar or a foot-pad; and a
politician or a journalist who utters base words is worse than a coiner
who utters base coin.
This being so, all the rich are bred and reared in an immoral
atmosphere.
But the atmosphere is polluted in other ways. The children of the rich
are perverted with false ideals. They are taught to regard themselves as
superior to the workers, who keep them. They are taught that it is sport
to murder helpless and harmless birds and beasts and fishes. They are
taught to toady to those above, and to expect toadyism from those below
them. They are given tacitly to understand that it is their lordly right
to command, and that it is the duty of the masses to obey. They are
allowed to believe that to be born "spacious in the possession of dirt,"
or free to wallow in unearned money, is honourable, and that to be poor
and landless is a proof of inferiority.
They are puffed up with false ideas of value, and suppose that to
possess an opulence of pride and a beggarly smattering of useless and
often hurtful knowledge, is more creditable than to be capable of making
honest pots and pans, and boots and trousers; of laying level pavements,
and cutting invaluable drains. They have their unfurnished minds
lumbered with immoral ideas of empire, of conquest, of titles, of stars
and garters. They are the spoilt children of Vanity Fair, and very many
of them are the lamentable failures which their environment would lead
us to expect.
No man is educated who has never learnt to do any kind of useful work;
no man lives in a good environment who has not been taught to think of
the welfare of his fellow creatures before his own, no life is sound,
nor sweet, nor moral, which is not based on useful service. Therefore
the environment of the rich is generally evil and not good.
These are not the reckless utterances of any angry demagogue. Every word
I have written about the evils of idleness, of luxury, of arrogance, of
vain-glory and self-love, is endorsed by the teachings of the wisest
and the best men of all ages; every word is supported by the records
of history, by the known facts of contemporary life; every word is in
accord with the new and the old morality.
It is a matter of common knowledge that the environment of the rich
"puts forth sins like scarlet flowers in summer."