"But for the grace of God," said the tinker of Elstow--but for the graces of environment, say we--there, in the hangman's cart, in the felon's jacket, in the dunce's cap, in the beggar's rags, in the degradation of the drunkard or the misery of the degenerate weed of the slums--go We. CHAPTER SEVEN--HOW HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT WORK THERE are many who have some understanding of heredity and of environment when taken separately who fail to realise their effects upon each other. The common cause of the stumbling is easy to remove. It is often said that two men are differently affected by the same environment, or what seems to be the same environment, and that therefore there must be some power in men to "overcome" their environment. I have dealt with this argument already, showing that the contest between a man and his environment is really a contest between heredity and environment, and may be compared to the effort of a man to swim against a stream. A given environment will affect two different men differently because their heredity is different. But remembering that we are born without any knowledge, and that we are born not with intellect nor conscience, but only with the rudiments of such, it must be insisted that the hereditary power to resist environment is very limited. So much so that we may amend our figure of the swimmer and the stream, and say that no man, howsoever strong and brave, could swim against a stream unless he had learnt to swim. And the learning to swim is environment, and works against the contrary environment, typified by the stream. Let us take the case of two children. One has bad and one good heredity. One is a healthy baby, born of moral stock. The other is a degenerate, born of immoral stock. We will call the healthy baby Dick, and the degenerate baby Harry. They are taken at birth into an environment of theft, drunkenness, and vice. They are taught to lie, to steal, and to drink. They never hear any good, never see a good example. Harry, the degenerate, will take to evil as a duck to water. Of that, I think, there is no question. But what of Dick, the healthy baby? Dick is born without knowledge. He is also born with undeveloped propensities. He will learn evil. His propensities will be trained to evil. How is he to "overcome his environment and become good"? He _cannot_. What will happen in Dick's case is that he will become a different kind of criminal--a stronger and cleverer criminal than Harry. But, I hear some one say, "we know that children, born of thieves and sots, and reared in bad surroundings, have turned out honest and sober men." And the inference is that they rose superior to their environment. But that inference is erroneous. The _fact_ is that these children were saved by some _good_ environment, acting against the bad.