Robert Blatchford

“ Is there any step in the long march of evolution, any link in the long chain of cause and effect, when any one of the things or beings evolved by law working on matter and force could by act or will of their own have developed otherwise than as they did?
Is it not plain that man has developed into that which he is by slow evolution of matter and force, through the operation of divine laws over which he had no more control than he now has over the revolution of the suns in their orbits?
How, then, can we believe that man is to blame for being that which he is? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the old and cruel conventions of society that hold you fast to the error that blame and punishment are righteous and salutary. It is ignorance of human nature that betrays you into the belief that men can be made honest and benevolent by cruelty and terror.
Punishment has never been just, has never been effectual. Punishment has always failed of its purpose: the greater its severity, the more abject its failure.
Men cannot be made good and gentle by means of violence and wrong. The real tamers and purifiers of human hearts are love and charity and reason. ”

“ And, when we come to think about it, we find that conscience never tells us anything we do not know. It is a voice which always tells us what we do know: what we believe. It does not teach us what acts are right and what acts are wrong. It reminds of what we have been taught about right or wrong.
It is not a divine voice, for it often leads us wrong. It is not a divine voice, for it is no wiser and no better than ourselves.
What is it? What is conscience? Conscience is chiefly habit: it is chiefly memory: but it is partly, perhaps, inherited instinct. Conscience is habit. ”

“ Men once saw no wrong in slavery, in trial by wager of battle, in witch-burning, in the torture of prisoners to extract evidence, in the whipping of lunatics, in the use of child-labour in mines and factories, in duelling, bear-baiting, prize-fighting, and heavy drinking.
Not very long ago men would tear out a man's tongue for "blasphemy," would hang a woman for stealing a turnip, would burn a bishop alive for heresy, would nail an author to the pillory by his ear for criticising a duke, would sell women and children felons into slavery; and conscience would never whisper a protest. ”

“ If, in the mercy of God, the day comes when I see myself as I am, when there is no more shuffling, when to myself Myself is compelled, even to the teeth and forehead of my faults, to give in evidence—if such a day comes, no juggling with words, no nonsense about not knowing any better or being driven by education upon organisation, by environment acting on heredity, will serve to conceal from my soul the hideous view of its own guilt. ”

“ The apostles of free will believe that all men's wills are free.
But a man can only will that which he is able to will. And one man is able to will that which another man is unable to will. To deny this is to deny the commonest and most obvious facts of life.
The will is as free in one nation and in one class as in another. Who would more willingly return a blow, an Irish soldier, or an English Quaker? Who would be readier to stab a rival, an English curate, or a Spanish smuggler? The difference does not concern the freedom of the will: it is a difference of heredity and environment. ”

“ No man should be idle. No man should be rich. No man should be ignorant, no man destitute. Every man should have a chance to earn the essentials to a wholesome, happy, temperate, and useful life. Every child should be nourished, and taught, and trained.
Crime, vice, disease, poverty, idleness: all these are preventable evils.
But we cannot drain our marshes, because, little as we heed the misery of the people, the ignorance and hunger of the children, the despair of the men and the degradation of the women, we are marvellously tender of Grand Ducal sport. ”

“ In the barren garden of his mind no flowers will blow, his trees will bear no fruit All human pleasure is to him a Circe cup; he finds no pathos in the children's laughter, no beauty in the dawn-shine; no glory in the constellations.
What are we to do for this wretched desperate brother who will not love us though we whip him with whips of wire, who will not make friends of us though we spurn and spit upon him; who, though we preach to him, cannot understand; who, though we teach him, cannot learn ”

“ This prisoner is but a type: a type of the legion victims of a selfish and cowardly society. Every day, in every city, in every country, innocent children are being poisoned and perverted by millions. Which of you has spoken a word or lifted a hand to prevent this wholesale wrong? What man of you all, who are so fierce against crime, so loud in praise of morality, has ever tried in act or speech to combat the crime and the immorality which society perpetuates: with your knowledge and consent? You who are so anxious to punish crime, what are you doing to prevent it? ”

“ 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? ”

“ If God can do all things, can He not make man free? Can He not give man the power to create actions as God creates stars? He can give His force; can He give a little of his sovereignty? Can He, in short, create a kind of little God—an "imago Dei?"
The answer to that quaint piece of reasoning is that it begs the question. For I do not say that God cannot give to man any power He chooses; but that God is responsible, and man is not responsible, for the nature and the acts of any power by God bestowed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And when I read of a murder, when I see some human wreck, so repulsive and unsightly that my soul is sick within me, and my flesh shudders away from the contact, I crush the anger out of my heart, and remember what I am and might have been, and that this man, this woman, now so dreadful or so vile, is a victim of a state of society which most of us believe in and uphold. ”

“ Whilst life is a sordid scramble, in which the prizes are pernicious wealth, and luxury, and idleness, and in which the blanks are hunger, ignorance, vice, unhappiness, the prison, and the gallows; immorality and crime must flourish as pestilence flourishes in a filthy, pent, and insanitary city. It is sad to see the custodians of the public morality bewailing the wickedness of men, and fostering the evil surroundings from which evil springs. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But it is not too late to save millions of innocent children from a like disaster and disgrace. It is not too late to prevent evil in the future, though we cannot atone for the evil wrought in the past.
We know, and the Christian knows, that where a murderer destroys one life society destroys thousands. We know that all through our pursy civilisation, in all the fine cities of our wealth, our culture, and our boastful piety, the ruin of children, the production of monsters, the desecration of human souls, is going steadily and ruthlessly on. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We all know that we cannot do more than we can, whether we believe in free will or no. But we do not know how much we can do, and nobody can tell us. The only way is to try. And we try just as hard as our nature and our desire impel us to try, and just as long as any desire or any hope remains.
Not only that, we commonly try when the limit of our attainment is in sight. For we try to get as near the limit as we can.
For instance. A young man adopts literature as his trade. He knows that before he dips a pen into a bottle that he will never reach the level of Shakespeare and Homer. ”

“ His strength is his heredity: his skill is the result of his environment. If his strength and skill are more than equal to the force of the stream he will conquer his environment; if the stream is too strong for him he will be conquered by his environment.
His acts, in short, depend wholly upon his nature and his environment: neither of which is of his own choosing. Of this I will say more in its place.
A man gets his nature from his forbears, just as certainly as he gets the shape of his nose, the length of his foot, and the colour of his eyes from his forbears. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The conflict in his mind is a conflict between the old Adam and the new; between the older egotism and the newer altruism. It is a conflict between good heredity and bad heredity; between heredity and environment; and the victory will be to the stronger.
If Brown is very ambitious, and not very conscientious, he will take the bribe. If his conscience is stronger than his ambition, he will refuse it. But to say that he is free to choose is a misuse of terms: he is only free to decide as the stronger of the two motives compels him to decide. And the motives arise from heredity and environment. ”

“ It is really what happens with the rifleman who gives way to the recoil and forms a habit of flinching, or with the cricketer who allows his desire to score to overcome his habit of caution. The old habit fades from disuse; the new habit grows strong from use. The rifleman becomes a hopelessly bad shot; the batsman degenerates into a slogger: the young man swears every time he speaks, and his conscience loses all power to check him. ”

“ If it concerns us that the religions of the world are childish dreams, or nightmares; if it concerns us that penal laws and moral codes are survivals of barbarism and fear; if it concerns us that our most cherished and venerable ideas of our relations to God and to each other are illogical and savage, then the case for the Bottom Dog concerns us nearly.
If it moves us to learn that disease may be prevented, that ruin may be averted, that broken hearts and broken lives may be made whole; if it inspires us to hear how beauty may be conjured out of loathliness and glory out of shame ”

“ They have no taste for anything higher? True. They have never been taught to know the highest. And their ignorance, and their slums, and their clownish pleasures, are part of their environment We need not ask whether such environment makes for culture, for joy, for health.
They have no refinement in their lives, these poor working millions. They have no flowers, no trees, no fields, no streams; no books, no art, no healthy games.
Worse than that, perhaps, they are paid neither honour nor respect: they are without pride and ambition; they have no ideals, no hope. ”

“ The tramp has committed a murder. It was a cowardly and cruel murder, and the motive was robbery.
But I have proved that all motives and all powers; all knowledge and capacity, all acts and all words, are caused by heredity and environment.
I have proved that a man can only be good or bad as heredity and environment cause him to be good or bad; and I have proved these things because I have to claim that all punishments and rewards, all praise and blame, are undeserved. ”

“ It is a strange notion this, that if you do not blame a man you cannot interfere with him. We do not blame a lunatic: even a Christian does not blame a lunatic. But we do not allow a madman to go round with an axe and murder people. We do not hang a madman, nor punish him in any way. If a murderer is proved to be mad he is pardoned and—restrained.
So, although we might not blame a thief, or a sweater, or a poisoner, it does not follow that we should allow him to go on stealing, or sweating, or murdering.
We propose to defend society from the individual ”

“ 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. ”

“ Grim old Thomas appeals to you. The prisoner is a scoundrel, and you do hate him. Nothing I have said, so far, has shaken that feeling. He is a scoundrel, and you hate him. What is more, you cannot forgive me for not hating him. You cannot believe that I am a natural man. I ought to hate him. Well, my friends, how do we feel about a shark? I think you will find that men hate a shark. And I think you will find that they hate him more bitterly than they hate a tiger. And I think you will find that they believe they hate the shark because he is cruel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CHAPTER THIRTEEN—THE FAILURE OF PUNISHMENT DOES it do a man any good to hang him? Does it do us any good to hang him? Is any human being in the wide world edified or bettered when a man is hanged? Is it any use hanging men?
That it is unjust to hang a man we have seen. But is it any use?
There is a certain school of moralists who are angered and alarmed by the mere suggestion that men should cease to blame and punish each other. They protest that virtue would die out and morality become a mockery if we ceased to scold, and whip, and execute each other. ”

“ Reason might prompt us to kill the ape as a precaution against a repetition of violence. But anger and hate are not reasonable, not human: all anger and all hate are bestial—like the hate and the anger of the tramp. But if the prisoner is not an atavist, or brute-man, if he has been reduced to his present moral state of environment, ask for some measure of compensation from the society; unjust laws, and dishonest social conditions, and immoral neglect are responsible for the fact that a brother man has been allowed, or rather compelled, by society, to grow up an ignorant and desperate savage. ”

“ So that it would be as easy for the drunkard as for the lifelong abstainer to refuse to drink; as easy for the thief as for the Cardinal to be honest; as easy for Macbeth as for Lady Macbeth to seal the fate of Duncan.
But we all know that it is harder for one man than for another to be sober, or honest, or virtuous; and we all know that the sobriety, or honesty, or virtue of any man depends upon his temperament and training; that is to say, upon his heredity and his environment.
How, then, can we believe that free will is outside and superior to heredity and environment? ”

“ I stress and multiply examples because the power of environment is so tremendous that we can hardly over-rate its importance.
A child is not born with a conscience; but with the rudiments of a conscience: the materials from which a conscience may or may not be developed—by environment.
A child is not born with capacities, but only with potentialities, or possibilities, for good or evil, which may or may not be developed—by environment.
A child is born absolutely without knowledge. Every atom of knowledge he gets must be got from his environment. ”

“ If man's flesh and woman's flesh are merchandise or carrion; if the defiled and trampled souls of innocent children are no more to us than are the trodden blossoms under the feet of swine; if love lies to us and pity is a cheat; if whips and chains and contumely and the gibbet are meet for our sisters and our brothers and if dishonourable ease and beggarly pride and the flatteries of fools are worthy of ourselves, then we have the Yellow Press and the painted altar and the Parliamentary speeches and a selfish heaven and a hell where the worm never dies ”