Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog. Robert Blatchford
simple and interesting; and I promise him to use no unfamiliar words, nor to trouble him with difficult and tedious scientific expositions.
I deal with heredity before environment, because it is needful to take them one at a time, and heredity comes first; as birth before schooling.
But we must not fall into the bad habit of thinking of heredity and environment apart from each other, for it is both, and not either of them that make man's character.
It is often said that neither heredity nor environment accounts for a man's conduct. And that is true. But it is true, also, that heredity and environment account for every quality in the human "make-up." A pianist, an artist, or a cricketer is "made as well as born," and so is every man. A good batsman is a good batsman for two reasons: (1) He was born with good sight, steady; nerves, and sound sense, all of which he owes to his ancestors. (2) He has been well taught, or has practised well, and this practice, this endeavour to succeed, he owes to his inherited ambition, and to the precept and example of other men. So if a man plays a fiddle well, or steers a ship well, or devotes his life to charity, the excellence is always due to heredity and environment. For the cricketer would never have been a cricketer, nor the violinist a violinist, had he been born in a country where cricket and violin playing were unknown. And, on the other hand, a man bred amongst cricketers or musicians will never excel in music nor in cricket unless he has what is called "a gift"; and the gift is "heredity."
Heredity is "descent," or "breed." Heredity, as the word is here used, means those qualities which are handed down from one generation to the next. It means those qualities which a new generation inherits from the generation from whom it descends.
It means all that "is bred in the bone." If a man inherits a Grecian nose, a violent temper, well-knit muscles, a love of excitement, or a good ear for music, from his father or mother, that quality or feature is part of his heredity. It is "bred in him."
Every quality a child possesses at the moment of birth, every quality of body or of mind, is inherited from his parents and their ancestors. And the whole of those qualities – which are the child – are what we call "heredity."
No child brings into the world one single quality of body or mind that has not been handed down to it by its ancestors.
And yet no two children are exactly alike, and no child is exactly like any one of its forbears.
This difference of children from each other and from the parent stock is called "variation."
Hundreds of books and papers have been written about "variation," and to read some of them one might suppose variation to be a very difficult subject. But it is quite simple, and will not give us any trouble at all. Let us see.
The cause of variation can be easily understood.
Variation is due to the fact that every child has two parents. If these two parents were exactly alike, and if their ancestors had been all exactly alike, their children would be exactly like each other and like their parents.
But the father and mother are of different families, of different natures, and perhaps of different races. And the ancestors of the father and mother – millions in number – were all different from each other in nature and in descent.
Now, since a child inherits some qualities from its father and some from its mother, it follows that if the father and mother are different from each other, the child must differ from both, and yet resemble both. For he will inherit from the father qualities which the mother has not inherited from her ancestors, and he will inherit from the mother qualities which the father did not inherit from his ancestors. So the child will resemble both parents, without being an exact copy of either. It "varies" from both parents by inheriting from each.
The child of a black and a white parent is what we call a half-caste: he is neither a negro nor a white man. The pup of a bulldog and a terrier is neither a bull-dog nor a terrier; he is a bull-terrier terrier.
But heredity goes farther than that, and variation is more complex than that.
We must not think of a man as inheriting from his father and mother only. He inherits from the parents of both his parents; and from thousands of ancestors before those. He inherits from men and women who died thousands of years before he was born. He inherits from the cave-man, from the tree-man, from the ape-man, from the ape, and from the beast before the ape.
The child in the womb begins as a cell, and develops through the stages of evolution, becoming an embryo worm, fish, quadruped, ape, and, finally, a human baby.
The child is born with the bodily and mental qualities inherited from many generations of beasts and many generations of men.
Any one of the many ancient qualities of mind or body may crop up again in a modern child. Children have been born with tails: children have been born with six nipples, like a dog, instead of with two, like a human being.
And now I will explain, simply and briefly, what we mean by the word "Atavism."
"Atavism," or "breeding back," or "reversion," may reach back through thousands of generations, and some trait of the cave-man, or the beast, may reappear in a child of Twentieth Century civilisation.
Darwin, in The Descent of Man, Chapter II, gives many instances of "atavism," or breeding back, by human beings to apish and even quadrupedal characteristics. Alluding to a case cited by Mr. J. Wood, in which a man had seven muscles "proper to certain apes," Darwin says:
It is quite incredible that a man should through mere accident abnormally resemble certain apes in no less than seven of his muscles, if there had been no genetic connection between them. On the other hand, if man is descended from some apelike creature, no valid reason can be assigned why certain muscles should not suddenly reappear after an interval of many thousand generations, in the same manner as with horses, asses, and mules, dark-coloured stripes suddenly reappear on the legs and shoulders after an interval of hundreds, or, more probably, of thousands of generations.
Dr. Lydston, in The Diseases of Society (Lippincott: 1904) says:
The outcropping of ancestral types of mentality is observed to underlie many of the manifestations of vice and crime. These ancestral types or traits may revert farther back even than the savage progenitors of civilised man, and approximate those of the lower animals who, in their turn, stand behind the savage in the line of descent.
This "reversion to older and lower types," or "breeding back," is important, because it is the source of much crime – the origin of very many "Bottom Dogs," as we shall see. But at present we need only notice that heredity, or breed, reaches back through immense distances of time; so that a man inherits not only from savage ancestors, but also from the brutes. And man has no power to choose his breed, has no choice of ancestors, but must take the qualities of body and mind they hand down to him, be those qualities good or bad.
Descent, or breed, does not work regularly. Any trait of any ancestor, beast or man, near or remote, may crop up suddenly in any new generation. A child may bear little likeness to its father or mother: it may be more like its great-grandfather, its uncle, or its aunt.
It is as though every dead fore-parent back to the dimmest horizon of time, were liable to put a ghostly finger in the pie, to mend or mar it.
Let us now use a simple illustration of the workings of heredity, variation, and atavism, or breeding back.
There is no need to trouble ourselves with the scientific explanations. What we have to understand is that children inherit qualities from their ancestors; that children vary from their ancestors and from each other; and that old types or old qualities may crop out suddenly and unexpectedly in a new generation. Knowing, as we do, that children inherit from their parents and fore-parents, the rest may be made, quite plain without a single scientific word.
In our illustration we will take for parents and children bottles, and for hereditary qualities beads of different colours.
Now, take a bottle of red beads, and call it male. Take a bottle