For the environment to be all bad, the child must be prevented from ever seeing a good deed, or reading a good book, or meeting a good man, woman, or child.
Now, we can imagine no town, nor slum, in which a child should never hear nor see anything good. He is almost certain at some time or other to encounter good influences.
And these good influences will affect a healthy child more strongly than they will affect a degenerate, just as the evil influences will affect him less fatally than they will affect a degenerate. Because the poor degenerate is born with a bias towards disease or crime.
Two children may be born of the same parents, reared in the same hovel, in the same slum, taught the same evil lesson. But they will meet different companions, and will have different experiences.
One may meet a good boy, or girl, or man, or woman, and may be influenced for good. The other may chance upon the very worst company.
Let us suppose that two children are born in a Hoxton slum, and that one of them falls under the influence of a Fagin, and the other has the good fortune to meet such a manly and sensible parson as our friend Cartmel! Would not the effects be very different? Yet at first sight the environment of the two boys would seem to be precisely alike.
And we shall always find that the man who rises above his environment has really been helped by good environment to overcome the bad environment He has learnt some good. And that learning is part of his environment He must have been taught some good if he knows any, for he was born destitute of knowledge.
A good mother, a wise friend, a pure girl, an honest teacher, a noble book, may save a child from the bad part of his environment.
It would appear at first sight that two boys taught in the same school, by the same teacher, would have the same school environment. But at a second thought we find that need not be the case.
We know what one bad boy can do in a class or in a room. We may know, then, that the boys who share a class or a room with a bad boy have a worse environment than the boys who escape his evil influences.