Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

by Robert Blatchford

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.