# Blatchford's environment includes the prejudices of the comfortable

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH07.P028](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH07.P028/#char=2225,2343): "On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming."

Robert Blatchford's *Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog*, published by the Clarion Press in 1906, supplies a particularly close comparison. The inspected text is the 1918 Boni and Liveright edition reproduced by Project Gutenberg. Its opening denies that people deserve either praise or blame for characters they did not create. Chapter VIII argues that improved food, air, knowledge and temperance can elevate people. Chesterton therefore addresses a real argument, rather than inventing the environmentalist connection between deprivation and conduct. [Blatchford, Author's Apology and chapter VIII](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43466/43466-h/43466-h.htm).

But Blatchford's chapter VI expressly rejects reducing environment to poverty or riches: it includes class prejudices, education, example and love. Chapter VII also allows good influences in slums and different outcomes for children raised in the same hovel. His position is causal determinism, not the equation of wealth with virtue. Nor is his humanitarian intention Chesterton's aristocratic conclusion: his opening asks society to help the unfortunate instead of punishing them. [Chapters VI–VII and Author's Apology](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43466/43466-h/43466-h.htm).

The paragraph's force is consequently best understood as a warning about political appropriation. If reformers describe deprived citizens as incapable of judgment, rulers can turn that description into an excuse to withhold their votes. Yet this requires additional premises: that political rights depend on demonstrated moral fitness, and that material comfort reliably supplies it. Neither follows merely from the claim that circumstances shape conduct. Chesterton's imaginary governing class makes the extra step visible when it moves from improving bedrooms to excluding their occupants. His reductio exposes a danger in a reformer's rhetoric; it does not establish that Blatchford's full theory logically requires aristocracy.

## Sources

- [Robert Blatchford, Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1918 edition)](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43466/43466-h/43466-h.htm), Title page; Author's Apology; chapter VI, opening definition of environment; chapter VII, Dick and Harry example; chapter VIII, opening
- [Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog, Clarion Press edition](https://books.google.com/books/about/Not_Guilty.html?id=2EJYAAAAMAAJ), Bibliographic information: Clarion Press, 1906, 261 pages

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