It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with Major
Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire
Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and
spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible
natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the
greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our
first duty--a duty to which every other consideration should be
sacrificed--is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable
poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drunken
but amiable," "fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker," "splendidly
criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization,
cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs
over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons
from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police
force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children
starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might
feed and clothe them.
It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil is an
evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him a malicious
injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not suppose that it
needed any exceptional clearness of wit to recognize in this an act of
diabolical cruelty. But in England such a recognition provokes a stare
of surprise, followed by an explanation that the outrage is punishment
or justice or something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated
attempt to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds
if such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were not
committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this were true,
which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our own to the
crimes from which we suffer is not helpless submission. Chickenpox is
an evil; but if I were to declare that we must either submit to it or
else repress it sternly by seizing everyone who suffers from it and
punishing them by inoculation with smallpox, I should be laughed at;
for though nobody could deny that the result would be to prevent
chickenpox to some extent by making people avoid it much more
carefully, and to effect a further apparent prevention by making them
conceal it very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see
that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil, and
must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and hygienic
measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man breaking into my
house and stealing my wife's diamonds I am expected as a matter of
course to steal ten years of his life, torturing him all the time. If
he tries to defeat that monstrous retaliation by shooting me, my
survivors hang him. The net result suggested by the police statistics
is that we inflict atrocious injuries on the burglars we catch in order
to make the rest take effectual precautions against detection; so that
instead of saving our wives' diamonds from burglary we only greatly
decrease our chances of ever getting them back, and increase our
chances of being shot by the robber if we are unlucky enough to disturb
him at his work.
But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of
imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and
flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing
compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it
were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be
embraced as St Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be
poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let
him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science
instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to
spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen
shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for
his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for "the
undeserving": let him be poor. Serve him right! Also--somewhat
inconsistently--blessed are the poor!
Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let
him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a
standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have
rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to
his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn
our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect
our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him
by turning the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty,
hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression
and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less deserving; and
let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but
horrors in hell upon earth. This being so, is it really wise to let him
be poor? Would he not do ten times less harm as a prosperous burglar,
incendiary, ravisher or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity's
comparatively negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose we were
to abolish all penalties for such activities, and decide that poverty
is the one thing we will not tolerate--that every adult with less than,
say, 365 pounds a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, and
every hungry half naked child forcibly fattened and clothed, would not
that be an enormous improvement on our existing system, which has
already destroyed so many civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours
in the same way?
Is there any radicle of such legislation in our parliamentary system?
Well, there are two measures just sprouting in the political soil,
which may conceivably grow to something valuable. One is the
institution of a Legal Minimum Wage. The other, Old Age Pensions. But
there is a better plan than either of these. Some time ago I mentioned
the subject of Universal Old Age Pensions to my fellow Socialist Mr
Cobden-Sanderson, famous as an artist-craftsman in bookbinding and
printing. "Why not Universal Pensions for Life?" said Cobden-Sanderson.
In saying this, he solved the industrial problem at a stroke. At
present we say callously to each citizen: "If you want money, earn it,"
as if his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself
alone. We do not even secure for him the opportunity of earning it: on
the contrary, we allow our industry to be organized in open dependence
on the maintenance of "a reserve army of unemployed" for the sake of
"elasticity." The sensible course would be Cobden-Sanderson's: that is,
to give every man enough to live well on, so as to guarantee the
community against the possibility of a case of the malignant disease of
poverty, and then (necessarily) to see that he earned it.
Undershaft, the hero of Major Barbara, is simply a man who, having
grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society
offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death
and destruction, it offered him, not a choice between opulent villainy
and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly
infamy. His conduct stands the Kantian test, which Peter Shirley's does
not. Peter Shirley is what we call the honest poor man. Undershaft is
what we call the wicked rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives.
Well, the misery of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of
men act and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted
and believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result
would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy, says
Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am prepared to kill
at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says, the final
test of sincerity. Like Froissart's medieval hero, who saw that "to rob
and pill was a good life," he is not the dupe of that public sentiment
against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who would
otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty
and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the
poor without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart's
knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the other
duties--which indeed are not duties at all when they conflict with it,
but plain wickednesses--behaved bravely, admirably, and, in the final
analysis, public-spiritedly. Medieval society, on the other hand,
behaved very badly indeed in organizing itself so stupidly that a good
life could be achieved by robbing and pilling. If the knight's
contemporaries had been all as resolute as he, robbing and pilling
would have been the shortest way to the gallows, just as, if we were
all as resolute and clearsighted as Undershaft, an attempt to live by
means of what is called "an independent income" would be the shortest
way to the lethal chamber. But as, thanks to our political imbecility
and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the best imitation of
a good life now procurable is life on an independent income, all
sensible people aim at securing such an income, and are, of course,
careful to legalize and moralize both it and all the actions and
sentiments which lead to it and support it as an institution. What else
can they do? They know, of course, that they are rich because others
are poor. But they cannot help that: it is for the poor to repudiate
poverty when they have had enough of it. The thing can be done easily
enough: the demonstrations to the contrary made by the economists,
jurists, moralists and sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend
them, or even doing the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and
abjectness, impose only on the hirers.
The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in
defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers
through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob
prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men
or aristocrats with a developed sense of life--men like Ruskin and
William Morris and Kropotkin--have enormous social appetites and very
fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses:
they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives
and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman is badly
dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is
anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not
a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and are
made ill by the architecture of their neighbors' houses. Trade patterns
made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and they can get nothing
else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease upon "slaughtered" cabinet
makers' furniture. The very air is not good enough for them: there is
too much factory smoke in it. They even demand abstract conditions:
justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the
cash nexus. Finally they declare that though to rob and pill with your
own hand on horseback and in steel coat may have been a good life, to
rob and pill by the hands of the policeman, the bailiff, and the
soldier, and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life,
but rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They call
on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at their
ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for its "damned
wantlessness" (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).
So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity. The
poor do not share their tastes nor understand their art-criticisms.
They do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the
contrary, they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities
from which the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It
is by surfeit and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their
hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise
and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference
between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the
Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. The difference
between a stockbroker's cheap and dirty starched white shirt and collar
and the comparatively costly and carefully dyed blue shirt of William
Morris is a difference so disgraceful to Morris in their eyes that if
they fought on the subject at all, they would fight in defence of the
starch. "Cease to be slaves, in order that you may become cranks" is
not a very inspiring call to arms; nor is it really improved by
substituting saints for cranks. Both terms denote men of genius; and
the common man does not want to live the life of a man of genius: he
would much rather live the life of a pet collie if that were the only
alternative. But he does want more money. Whatever else he may be vague
about, he is clear about that. He may or may not prefer Major Barbara
to the Drury Lane pantomime; but he always prefers five hundred pounds
to five hundred shillings.
Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that it is
sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit
of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal
regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one
sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing
in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and
beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents
illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of
its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it
fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened
to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it
becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social
conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are
inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed
socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money.
The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on
reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four
men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours' drudgery and one man
a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for
better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption
of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and
fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to
be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft,
demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of
the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.
Once take your eyes from the ends of the earth and fix them on this
truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft's views will not
perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he is
only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes
wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are
walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity.
All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them
Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect
comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover the
Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. That, however, is not
new, even on the stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that article
in Undershaft's religion which recognizes in Money the first need and
in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.
This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained per saltum.
Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man born beyond the
Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own department the greatest
English writer of the latter half of the XIX century, steadily
inculcated the necessity and morality of a conscientious Laodiceanism
in religion and of an earnest and constant sense of the importance of
money. It drives one almost to despair of English literature when one
sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's posthumous
Way of All Flesh making so little impression that when, some years
later, I produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free
and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with
nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am only too
thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand.
Really, the English do not deserve to have great men. They allowed
Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a comparatively
insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by the nose into an
advertisement of me which has made my own life a burden. In Sicily
there is a Via Samuele Butler. When an English tourist sees it, he
either asks "Who the devil was Samuele Butler?" or wonders why the
Sicilians should perpetuate the memory of the author of Hudibras.
Well, it cannot be denied that the English are only too anxious to
recognize a man of genius if somebody will kindly point him out to
them. Having pointed myself out in this manner with some success, I now
point out Samuel Butler, and trust that in consequence I shall hear a
little less in future of the novelty and foreign origin of the ideas
which are now making their way into the English theatre through plays
written by Socialists. There are living men whose originality and power
are as obvious as Butler's; and when they die that fact will be
discovered. Meanwhile I recommend them to insist on their own merits as
an important part of their own business.