Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

by Robert Blatchford

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."