Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

by Robert Blatchford

Environment cannot make a genius. No amount of feeding, training, and teaching will make an average man into a Shakespeare, or a Plato. But good environment will do more for the dullest of men than bad environment will do.

Environment cannot prevent atavism. It may happen that the best of stock will "breed back" to a lower type. It may happen that a criminal or an incapable will crop out suddenly in a line of good and intelligent men and women. But good environment will abolish degeneracy, as certainly as bad environment will cause it.

For the occasional genius we need feel no concern. He will come when heredity produces him; and he is welcome. And for the atavist, or "born criminal," we may be thankful that he is comparatively rare, and may content ourselves with doing the best we can with him, in future, instead of the worst, as heretofore.

I am assuming that the worst type of born criminal is quite hopeless; but I am not sure of that. We can tame wild beasts, and why not wild men?

But the dismal scientists will tell us that even good environment cannot improve the race, because "acquired characteristics cannot be transmitted": which is to say that knowledge cannot be handed down hereditarily from father to son, and that, therefore, all that the best environment can do is to begin at the beginning with each generation, to teach and train them.

I deny that, and will give my reasons. But suppose we admit it. What follows?

Is it not better to teach and to train each generation well, than to teach and train them ill?

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?

And now, as to that question of improving the breed, I claim that environment would improve the breed, and would improve it as it has improved it in the past, by "natural selection."