FRIENDS, I write to defend the Bottom Dog. It is a task to stagger the
stoutest heart. With nearly all the power, learning, and wealth of the
world against him; with all the precedents of human history against
him; with law, religion, custom, and public sentiment against him, the
unfortunate victim's only hope is in the justice of his case. I would he
had a better advocate, as I trust he some day will.
The prosecution claim a monopoly of learning, and virtue, and modesty.
They may be justified in this. I do not grudge them such authority as
their shining merits may lend to a case so unjust, so feeble, and so
cruel as theirs.
Many of the gentlemen on the other side are Christian ministers. They
uphold blame and punishment, in direct defiance of the teaching and
example of Jesus Christ.
The founder of their religion bade them love their enemies. He taught
them that if one stole their coat they should give him their cloak also.
He prevented the punishment of the woman taken in adultery, and called
upon him without sin to cast the first stone. He asked God to forgive
his murderers, because they knew not what they did. In not one of these
cases did Christ say a word in favour of punishment nor of blame.
Christians pray to be forgiven, as they forgive; they ask God to "have
mercy upon us miserable sinners"; they ask Him to "succour, help, and
comfort all that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation," and
to "show His pity upon all prisoners and captives"; how, then, can
Christians advocate the blame of the weak, and the punishment of the
persecuted and unfortunate?
I suggest that men who do not understand their own religion are not
likely to understand a religion to which they are opposed.
As I am generally known as a poor man's advocate, I ask you to remember
that I am not now appearing for the poor, but for the wrong-doer. There
are many very poor who do no serious wrong; there are many amongst the
rich, the successful, and the respectable, whose lives are evil.
One does not live half a century without knowing one's world pretty
well. I know the honourable and noble lord, full of gout, vainglory, and
stealthy vices; I know the fashionable divine, with pride in his
heart, milk on his lips, and cobwebs in his brain; I know the smug
respectability, with low cunning under his silk hat, and chicanery
buttoned up in his irreproachable frock coat; I know the fine lady,
beautiful as a poppy, who is haughty from sheer lack of sense; I know
the glib orator of mean acts and golden words; I know the elected person
of much dignity and little wit,' and the woman of much loveliness and
little love.
I have to defend men and women whose deeds revolt me, whose presence
disgusts me. I have to defend them against the world, and against my own
prejudices and aversion. For I also have a heredity and an environment,
and therefore crochets, and passions, and antipathies. Though I can
defend all victims of heredity and environment, though I can demand
justice for the worst, yet my nature loathes the bully and the tyrant,
and still more does it loathe the mean: the man of the Judas spirit, who
barters children's lives, and women's souls, and the manhood of cities,
for dirty pieces of silver. Such a wretch is not to be hated, is not to
be punished: he is to be pitied and I am to defend him. But when I
think of him my soul is sick. I feel as if a worm had crawled over me.
I cannot help this. I cannot endure him. I am not big enough: I lack
the grace. I pity him profoundly; but my pity is cold. I pity the
devil-fish, and the conger eel; but I could not touch them. They are
repulsive to me.
It is very difficult for us to separate the man from his acts. It is
very difficult for us to hate and to loathe the acts, without hating and
loathing the man. This is the old, old Adam in us, rebelling against
the new altruism and the new reason. We are still a long way behind our
ideals.
It is no part of my plan to flatter the world. I know you, my brothers
and sisters, too well for that. There is a strong family resemblance
between us. Your ancestors, also, had tails. And then, like Thoreau,
"I know what mean and sneaking lives many of you lead." The majority of
you, indeed, are still little better than barbarians. The mass of you
waste your lives and starve your souls for the sake of beads and scalps,
and flesh and firewater. Your heroes are, too, often, mere prowling
appetites, or solemn vanities, ravenous for pudding and praise; mere
tailor-made effigies, to stick stars upon, or feathers into; mere
painted idols for ignorance to worship; embroidered serene-emptiness for
flunkeys to bow down to: kings and things of shreds and patches.
Yes. We are all painfully human, and under a régime of blame and
punishment may count ourselves extremely lucky if we have never been
found out.
Do not let us stand in too great awe of our ancestors. They also
trafficked and junketted in Vanity Fair. The prosecution lay stress
upon the universal custom and experience of mankind The world has never
ordered its life by rules of wisdom and understanding. It has paid more
court to the rich than to the good, and more heed to the noisy than to
the wise. The world has imprisoned as many honest men as rogues, has
slain more innocent than guilty, has decorated more criminals than
heroes, has believed a thousand times less truth than lies. Is it not
so, men and women? Does not common experience support the charge?
Let us, then, understand each other, before we go any farther. The glory
of manhood and womanhood is not to have something, but to be something;
is not to get something, but to give something; is not to rule but to
serve.
The greatness of a nation does not lie in its wealth and power, but in
the character of its men and women. With greatness in the people all the
rest will follow, as surely as when the greatness of the people wanes
the rest will be quickly lost. The history of all great empires tells us
this: Japan is just now repeating the lesson.
What is it most men strive for? Wealth and fame. These are prizes for
little men, not for big men. They are prizes that often inflict untold
misery in the winning, and are nearly always a curse to the winner. Vice
and crime are fostered by luxury and idleness on the one hand, and by
ignorance and misery on the other hand. The poor are poor that the rich
may be rich; and the riches and the poverty are a curse to both.
Consider all the vain pride and barbaric pomp of wealth and fashion, and
all the mean envy of the weakly snobs who revere them, and would sell
their withered souls to possess them. Is this decorative tomfoolery, are
this apish swagger and blazoned snobbery worthy of _men_ and _women?_
The powdered flunkeys, the gingerbread coaches, the pantomime
processions, the trumpery orders and fatuous titles: are they any nobler
or more sensible than the paint, the tom-toms, and the Brummagen jewels
of darkest Africa?
And the cost! We are too prone to reckon cost in cash. We are too prone
to forget that cash is but a symbol of things more precious. We bear too
tamely all the bowing and kow-towing; all the fiddling and fifing, all
the starring and gartering, and be-feathering and begemming, all the
gambling and racing, the saluting and fanfaring, the marching and
counter-marching, all the raking in of dividends, and building up of
mansions, all the sweating and rackrenting, all the heartless vanity,
and brainless luxury, and gilded vice: we should think of them more
sternly did we count up what they cost in men and women and children,
what they cost in brawn and brain, and honour and love, what they cost
in human souls--what they cost in Bottom Dogs.
Happiness cannot be stolen; nor won by cheating, as though life were a
game of cards. The man who would be happy must find his duty, and do it.
In no other way can man or woman find real happiness, under the sun.
But the world, so far has quite a different creed. And the common
experience, on which the Christians so much depend, is not on the side
of the angels. And that is why the Bottom Dogs are so numerous, and why
so many of us lead "such mean and sneaking lives."
Descendants of barbarians and beasts, we have not yet conquered the
greed and folly of our bestial and barbarous inheritance. Our nature is
an unweeded garden. Our hereditary soil is rank. Talk about the trouble
of bringing up children: what is that to the trouble of educating one's
ancestors? O, the difficulty I have had with mine.
My friends: you have read my statement of the case for the Bottom Dog;
you have read the arguments I have used in support of that statement:
you have read the evidence, and you have read my answers to the
arguments of the other side.
I claim to have proved that all human actions are ruled by heredity
and environment, that man is not responsible for his heredity and
environment, and that therefore all blame and all punishment are unjust.
I claim to have proved that blame and punishment, besides being unjust
are ineffectual.
I claim that the arguments which apply to heredity and environment apply
also to the soul, for since man did not create the soul he cannot be
responsible for its acts.
I claim to have explained the so-called "mysteries" of conscience, and
of the "dual personality," and to have proved them to be the natural
action of heredity and environment.
I claim to have proved that morality comes through natural evolution,
and not by any kind of super-natural revelation.
I claim to have proved that the argument from universal experience is
fallacious, and to have shown that universal experience has misled us in
the manner of human responsibility as in so many other matters.
I claim to have proved that the theory here advocated is based upon
justice and reason, and is more moral and beneficient than the Christian
religion, under which so much wrong, and waste, and misery continue to
exist unchecked and unrebuked.
I claim to have proved that the prosecution do not understand the case,
and that their arguments are for the most part mere misrepresentations
or misunderstandings of the issues and the facts.
It remains for me now to say a few words as to the wrongs suffered by my
unfortunate client; and as to the necessity for so altering the laws and
customs of society as to prevent the perpetration of all this cruelty
and injustice; of all this waste of human love, and human beauty, and
human power.
We are sometimes asked to think imperially: it would be better to think
universally. Illimitable as is the universe, it appears in all its
parts to obey the same laws. Its suns may be told by millions; but
matter and force compose and rule them all. Carlyle spoke of the
contrast between heaven and Vauxhall; but Vauxhall is in the heavens,
by virtue of the same law that there holds Canopus and the Pleiades. We
think of the dawn-star as of something heavenly pure, and of the earth
as grey in sorrow and sin; but the earth is a star--a planet, bright and
beautiful as Venus in a purple evening sky.
We gaze with wondering awe at the loveliness and mystery of the Galaxy,
that bent beam of glory whose motes are suns, that luminous path of
dreams whose jewels are alive; but we forget that Whitechapel, and
Oldham, and Chicago, and the Black Country, are in the Milky Way. In
that awful ocean of Space are many islands; but they are all akin.
In the "roaring loom of time." howsoever the colours may change, the
pattern vary, the piece is all one piece; it is knit together, thread to
thread. All men are brothers. From the age beyond the Aryans the threads
are woven and joined together. _All_ of us had ancestors with tails. All
the myriads of human creatures, since the first ape stood erect, have
been like leaves upon one tree, nourished by the same sap, fed from the
same root, warmed by the same sun, washed by the same rains. All our
polities, philosophies, and religions, grow out of each other. We
can never fully understand any one of them until we know the whole.
Comparative anatomy, comparative philology, comparative mythology, all
comparative sciences, tell us the same story of growth, of evolution, of
kinship. Babylon and Egypt, India and Persia, Greece and Rome, Gothland
and Scandinavia, Britain and Gaul; Osiris, Krishna, Confucius, Brahma,
Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, Mahomet: all are parts of one whole, all
parts related each to other. The oldest nations speak in our languages
to-day, the oldest savages survive in our bodies, the oldest gods have
part in our religious forms and ceremonies, the oldest superstitions and
faults and follies, still obscure our minds and impede our action. We
cannot thrust the dead aside and stand alone: the dead are part of us.
We cannot take a man and isolate him, and judge and understand him,
as though he were a new and special creation. He is of kin to all the
living and the dead. He stands one figure in the great human pageant,
and cannot be taken out of the picture: cannot be cut out from the
background--that background of a thousand ages, and of innumerable women
and men. He belongs to the great human family: he, also, is in the Milky
Way.
Old families, and noble families are made of parchment or paper: there
is but one real family of flesh and blood, and that reaches back to the
clot of jelly in the sea, and we all belong to it.
When I hear some little Brick Lane Brother talking about the true faith,
as taught in a tin chapel in Upper Tooting, I think of the star-readers
of the Aryan hills, of the dead gods, and the obliterated beliefs of
ancient conquerors, long since eaten by worms, and of the shrivelled
corpse in the museum who has lain grinning in his sandhole for thirty
thousand years, amongst his grave pots, and ghost charms, and the
uneaten food for the long journey to the great beyond. When I hear
honourable members prating in the House about "Imperial questions," I
think of the famished seamstress, the unemployed docker, the girl with
the phossy jaw, whom the honourable gentleman "represents." When I read
of the gorgeous stage-management of the royal pageants, I remember the
graves of the Balaclava men, in the Manchester workhouse field, where
the sods were spread out level over the neglected dead. When I see
beautiful sculptures and paintings of Greek womanhood, I remember how,
coming out of the art gallery where I had been looking at the picture of
Andromache, I saw a white-haired old Englishwoman carrying a great bag
of cinders on her bent old back. When I hear the angelic voices of
the choirs, and see the golden plate on cathedral altars, I ask myself
questions about that Bridge of Sighs where London women drown themselves
in their despair, and about that child in the workhouse school who tamed
a mouse because he must have something to love. When a callow preacher
babbles to his grown-up congregation about sin and human nature, I
remember the men and women I have known: the soldiers, the navvies, the
colliers, the doctors, the lawyers, the authors, the artists; I remember
the dancing-rooms in the garrison town, and the girls, and how they were
womanly in their degradation, and sweet in spite of their shame; and I
wondered what the reverend gentleman would answer them if they spoke to
him as they often spoke to me, in words that were straight as blades,
and cut as deep.
And often, when I mix with the crowds in the streets, or at the theatre,
or in public assemblies, I feel that I am in the presence of the haunted
past, and the whole human story unfolds itself to my mind: the primeval
savage with "his fell of hair," fighting with other savages, under
"branching elm, star-proof"; the Ethiopian warrior in his battle
chariot; the bent slave, toiling on the pyramid; the armed knight
errant, foraying, and redressing sentimental wrongs; the fearless
Viking, crossing oceans in his open galley, to discover continents;
the gladiator in the Roman arena; the Greek Stoics, discoursing at
the fountain; Drake singeing the King of Spain's beard; St. Francis
preaching to the birds; the Buddha, giving his body to the famished
tigress; the Aryan at the plough, the Phoenician in his bark, the
Californian seeking gold, the whaler amongst the ice, the ancient Briton
in his woad--all the mysterious and fascinating human drama of love
and hate, of hunger and riches, and laughter and tears, and songs and
sobbings, and dancing and drunkenness, and marriage and battle, and
heroism and cowardice, and murder and robbery, and the quest of God.
That wonderful human mystery-play, how softly it touches us, how deeply
it moves us, with its hum of myriad voices, its vision of white arms,
and flashing weapons, and beckoning fingers, and asking looks, and the
ripple of its laughter, like the music of hidden streams in leafy woods,
and the lisp of its unnumbered feet, and the weird rhythm of its war
songs, and the pathos of its joy-bells, and the pity of its follies, and
its failures, and its crimes--the pity; "the pity of it, the pity
of it."
Possessed, then by this dreaming habit, this Janus-like bent of mind,
I cannot think of the Bottom Dog apart from the whole bloodstained,
tearstained tragedy of man's inhumanity to man. For the Bottom Dog is a
child of all the ages, he plays his part in a drama whereof the scene
is laid in the Milky Way. He recalls to us the long wavering war between
darkness and light, the life and death struggle of the brute to be a
man, the painful never-ceasing effort of man to understand.
We cannot look back over that trampled and sanguinary field of
history without a shudder; but we must look. It reaches back into the
impenetrable mists of time, it reaches forward to our own thresholds,
which still are wet with blood and tears, and on every rood of it,
in ghastly horror, are heaped the corpses of the men, and women, and
children slain by the righteous, in the name of justice, and in the
name of God. Though the gods perished, though the vane of justice veered
until right became wrong, and wrong right, yet the crimes continued, the
horrible mistakes were repeated; the holy, and the noble, and cultivated
still cried for their brother's blood, still trampled the infants under
their holy feet, still forced the maidens and the mothers to slavery and
shame.
Men and women, is it not true?
From fear of ghosts and devils, and for the glory of the gods of India,
of Babylon, of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, of France, of Spain, of
England, were not millions tortured, and burnt, and whipped, and hanged,
and crucified?
Witchcraft, and heresy, idolatry, sacrifice, propitiation, divine
vengeance; what seas of blood, what holocausts of crime, what long-drawn
tragedies of agony and Moody sweat do these names not recall? And they
were all mistakes! They were all nightmares, born of ignorance and
superstition! We have awakened from those nightmares. Our gods no longer
lust after human blood. We know that heresy is merely difference of
education, that there never was a witch; we know that all those millions
wept and bled and died for nothing: that they were tortured, enslaved,
degraded and murdered, by the holy, through ignorance, and fear, and
superstition.
If we turn from the crimes and blunders of prophets and of priests to
the laws of Kings and Parliaments, we find the same ignorance, the same
ferocity, the same futility. I could fill a bigger book than mine with
the mere catalogue of the punishments and the instruments of torture
invented by tyrants, and land-grabbers, and superior persons for the
protection of their privileges, and their plunder, and their luxury and
ease. For thousands of years the whip, the chain, the rack, the gibbet,
and the sword, have been used to uphold the laws made by robbers, and
by idlers, and by ambitious lunatics., to punish the "crimes" of the
ignorant and the weak.
Men and women, is it not true?
And all the agony and blood and shame were ineffectual. And always blame
and punishment bred hate, and savagery, and more crime.
"But it is different to-day."
It is the same to-day. The laws to-day are defences of the foolish rich
against the ignorant and hungry poor. The laws to-day, like the laws of
the past, make more criminals than they punish. The laws keep the people
ignorant and poor, and the rich idle and vicious. The laws to-day, as
in the day of Isaiah, enable the rich to "add field to field, until
the people have no room." The laws to-day sacrifice a thousand innocent
children to preserve one useful, lazy, unhappy, superior person. The
laws to-day punish as a criminal the child who steals a loaf, or a pair
of boots, and honour as a grandee the man whose greed and folly keep the
workers off the land, and treble the rents in the filthy and indecent
slums where age has no reverence, and toil no ease, and where shame has
laid its hand upon the girl child's breast.
What was the old denunciation of those who cried "peace, peace, when
there is no peace," and what shall we say of those priests and holy men
who cry "morality, morality," where there is no morality, where usury
and exploitation are honoured arts: where crime and vice are taught to
the children as in a school?
If you sow tares, can you reap wheat? If you sow hate can you reap love?
If you sow wrong can you reap right? If you teach and practise knavery,
can you ask for purity and virtue?
The laws were made by ignorant and dishonest men, they are administered
by men ignorant and selfish; they are dishonest laws; good for neither
rich nor poor; evil in their conception, evil in their enforcement, evil
in their results.
There need not be any such things as poverty and ignorance in the world.
The earth is bounteous, and yields enough, and more than enough, for
all.
Men and women: I beg of you to do all that is in your power to change
the unjust laws, and the uncharitable and unreasonable opinions, which
make the deadly environment that fosters vice and crime.
For, besides that the laws are unjust, that the teachings of our
superior persons are untrue, that blame and punishment must fail as they
have always failed, there is the awful _waste_--the waste of life, and
love, of beauty and power that the present cruel system entails.
Think of the loveliness of a good woman, the blessing of her; think
of the sweetness and the joy of an innocent child, of the value and
nobility of an honest man. Picture to yourself the kind of woman you
would wish your daughter to be, the kind of man you would wish your son
to be. Then remember what good or bad environment can make of the young.
I tell you there is hardly a battered drab, a broken pauper, a hardened
thief, a hopeless drunkard, a lurking tramp, a hooligan, but who might
have been an honest and a useful citizen under fair conditions.
Good women: if ever you felt the thrill of a dear child's fingers on
your throat or breast, think what millions of such children in our
cities must become.
Good men: if you honour womanhood, if you love your daughters and your
wives, think of the women and the girls in the streets, in the fields,
in the factories, and in the jails, and then look into your mirrors for
a friend to save them.
Men and women: as the little children are now the ruffian and the harlot
once were; as the ruffian and the harlot are now millions of helpless
children must become unless you give them sympathy and aid.
It is no use looking for help to heaven: we must look upon the earth. It
is no use asking God to help us: we must help ourselves.
My friends: for the sake of good men, who are better than their gods;
for the sake of good women, who are the pride and glory of the world;
for the sake of the dear children, who are sweeter to us than the
sunshine or the flowers; for the sake of the generation not yet spoiled
or lost; for the sake of the nations yet unborn; in the names of
justice, of reason and truth, I ask you for a verdict of Not Guilty.