Well, he is dead; his stiff neck broken, and his body wrapped in a winding sheet of lime. And we? We remain the superior persons we are. We are civilised, and holy. We punish weakness with blows, and misfortune with chains. We teach sweet reasonableness with the cat-o'-nine-tails--steeped in brine. We exemplify gentleness and mercy with the gibbet and the axe. We brand the blind, and torture the imbecile, and execrate the miserable, and damn the diseased, and revile the fallen; we set our righteous heel upon the creeping thing, and thank our anomalous and hypothetical God of Love and Justice that we are not as those others--our atavistic brother and his degenerate children. And our atavistic brother, the criminal born! He does not understand us, he does not admire us, he cannot love us. We fail, in some inexplicable way, to charm the deaf adder, charm we never so wisely. But some day, perhaps, when the superior person has achieved humility, even the outlawed Bottom Dog may come by some crumbs of sympathy, some drops of the milk of human kindness, and--then? CHAPTER SIX--ENVIRONMENT WHAT is environment? When we speak of a man's environment we mean his surroundings, his experiences; all that he sees, hears, feels, and learns from the instant that the lamp of life is kindled to the instant when the light goes out. By environment we mean everything that develops or modifies the child or the man for good or for ill. We mean his mother's milk; the home, and the state of life into which he was born. We mean the nurse who suckles him, the children he plays with, the school he learns in, the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he eats. We mean the games he plays, the work he does, the sights he sees, the sounds he hears. We mean the girls he loves, the woman he marries, the children he rears, the wages he earns. We mean the sickness that tries him, the griefs that sear him, the friends who aid and the enemies who wound him. We mean all his hopes and fears, his victories and defeats; his faiths and his disillusionments. We mean all the harm he does, and all the help he gives; all the ideals that beckon him, all the temptations that lure him; all his weepings and laughter, his kissings and cursings, his lucky hits and unlucky blunders: everything he does and suffers under the sun. I go into all this detail because we must remember that everything that happens to a man, everything that influences him, is a part of his environment. It is a common mistake to think of environment in a narrow sense, as though environment implied no more than poverty or riches. Everything outside our skin belongs to our environment.