For the present, however, it is not my business to flatter the
Salvation Army. Rather must I point out to it that it has almost as
many weaknesses as the Church of England itself. It is building up a
business organization which will compel it eventually to see that its
present staff of enthusiast-commanders shall be succeeded by a
bureaucracy of men of business who will be no better than bishops, and
perhaps a good deal more unscrupulous. That has always happened sooner
or later to great orders founded by saints; and the order founded by St
William Booth is not exempt from the same danger. It is even more
dependent than the Church on rich people who would cut off supplies at
once if it began to preach that indispensable revolt against poverty
which must also be a revolt against riches. It is hampered by a heavy
contingent of pious elders who are not really Salvationists at all, but
Evangelicals of the old school. It still, as Commissioner Howard
affirms, "sticks to Moses," which is flat nonsense at this time of day
if the Commissioner means, as I am afraid he does, that the Book of
Genesis contains a trustworthy scientific account of the origin of
species, and that the god to whom Jephthah sacrificed his daughter is
any less obviously a tribal idol than Dagon or Chemosh.
Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the Army. Like
Frederick's grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever (the
most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and though it is evident to
anyone who has ever heard General Booth and his best officers that they
would work as hard for human salvation as they do at present if they
believed that death would be the end of them individually, they and
their followers have a bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists
were heroically enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment
which will bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a
better life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent by
themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any active
person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the Salvationists
are unusually happy people. And is it not the very diagnostic of true
salvation that it shall overcome the fear of death? Now the man who has
come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change so
called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and utterly
careless life, has not overcome the fear of death at all: on the
contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on
any terms whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really saved until he
is ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap, having paid scot and
lot and something over, and let his eternal life pass on to renew its
youth in the battalions of the future.
Then there is the nasty lying habit called confession, which the Army
encourages because it lends itself to dramatic oratory, with plenty of
thrilling incident. For my part, when I hear a convert relating the
violences and oaths and blasphemies he was guilty of before he was
saved, making out that he was a very terrible fellow then and is the
most contrite and chastened of Christians now, I believe him no more
than I believe the millionaire who says he came up to London or Chicago
as a boy with only three halfpence in his pocket. Salvationists have
said to me that Barbara in my play would never have been taken in by so
transparent a humbug as Snobby Price; and certainly I do not think
Snobby could have taken in any experienced Salvationist on a point on
which the Salvationist did not wish to be taken in. But on the point of
conversion all Salvationists wish to be taken in; for the more obvious
the sinner the more obvious the miracle of his conversion. When you
advertize a converted burglar or reclaimed drunkard as one of the
attractions at an experience meeting, your burglar can hardly have been
too burglarious or your drunkard too drunken. As long as such
attractions are relied on, you will have your Snobbies claiming to have
beaten their mothers when they were as a matter of prosaic fact
habitually beaten by them, and your Rummies of the tamest
respectability pretending to a past of reckless and dazzling vice. Even
when confessions are sincerely autobiographic there is no reason to
assume at once that the impulse to make them is pious or the interest
of the hearers wholesome. It might as well be assumed that the poor
people who insist on showing appalling ulcers to district visitors are
convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity which sometimes welcomes
such exhibitions is a pleasant and creditable one. One is often tempted
to suggest that those who pester our police superintendents with
confessions of murder might very wisely be taken at their word and
executed, except in the few cases in which a real murderer is seeking
to be relieved of his guilt by confession and expiation. For though I
am not, I hope, an unmerciful person, I do not think that the
inexorability of the deed once done should be disguised by any ritual,
whether in the confessional or on the scaffold.
And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all
propagandists of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all
gibbets) becomes deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement, are
figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one crime by
another; and you can no more have forgiveness without vindictiveness
than you can have a cure without a disease. You will never get a high
morality from people who conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and
pardonable, or in a society where absolution and expiation are
officially provided for us all. The demand may be very real; but the
supply is spurious. Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the
Salvation Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable
conviction of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara. Straightway
he begins to try to unassault the lass and deruffianize his deed, first
by getting punished for it in kind, and, when that relief is denied
him, by fining himself a pound to compensate the girl. He is foiled
both ways. He finds the Salvation Army as inexorable as fact itself. It
will not punish him: it will not take his money. It will not tolerate a
redeemed ruffian: it leaves him no means of salvation except ceasing to
be a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps
the central truth of Christianity and discards its central
superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and
punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the world by
the gibbet.
For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman also;
and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever, because she
makes it clear that her malice is as great as his own. "Let her have
the law of me, as she said she would," says Bill: "what I done to her
is no more on what you might call my conscience than sticking a pig."
This shows a perfectly natural and wholesome state of mind on his part.
The old woman, like the law she threatens him with, is perfectly ready
to play the game of retaliation with him: to rob him if he steals, to
flog him if he strikes, to murder him if he kills. By example and
precept the law and public opinion teach him to impose his will on
others by anger, violence, and cruelty, and to wipe off the moral score
by punishment. That is sound Crosstianity. But this Crosstianity has
got entangled with something which Barbara calls Christianity, and
which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to play the hangman's game of
Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to prosecute a drunken ruffian;
she converses on equal terms with a blackguard whom no lady could be
seen speaking to in the public street: in short, she behaves as
illegally and unbecomingly as possible under the circumstances. Bill's
conscience reacts to this just as naturally as it does to the old
woman's threats. He is placed in a position of unbearable moral
inferiority, and strives by every means in his power to escape from it,
whilst he is still quite ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by
attempting to smash a mug on her face. And that is the triumphant
justification of Barbara's Christianity as against our system of
judicial punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and "poetic
justice" of the romantic stage.
For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation
is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the
convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman
annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valjean. But Bill
Walker is not, like Valjean, romantically changed from a demon into an
angel. There are millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society
to-day; and the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology,
desire to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his
character whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and
another way to another.
In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided by our
commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands: merciless,
unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery to their
competitors and employees, and facing desperately the worst that their
competitors can do to them. The history of the English factories, the
American trusts, the exploitation of African gold, diamonds, ivory and
rubber, outdoes in villainy the worst that has ever been imagined of
the buccaneers of the Spanish Main. Captain Kidd would have marooned a
modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune.
The law every day seizes on unsuccessful scoundrels of this type and
punishes them with a cruelty worse than their own, with the result that
they come out of the torture house more dangerous than they went in,
and renew their evil doing (nobody will employ them at anything else)
until they are again seized, again tormented, and again let loose, with
the same result.
But the successful scoundrel is dealt with very differently, and very
Christianly. He is not only forgiven: he is idolized, respected, made
much of, all but worshipped. Society returns him good for evil in the
most extravagant overmeasure. And with what result? He begins to
idolize himself, to respect himself, to live up to the treatment he
receives. He preaches sermons; he writes books of the most edifying
advice to young men, and actually persuades himself that he got on by
taking his own advice; he endows educational institutions; he supports
charities; he dies finally in the odor of sanctity, leaving a will
which is a monument of public spirit and bounty. And all this without
any change in his character. The spots of the leopard and the stripes
of the tiger are as brilliant as ever; but the conduct of the world
towards him has changed; and his conduct has changed accordingly. You
have only to reverse your attitude towards him--to lay hands on his
property, revile him, assault him, and he will be a brigand again in a
moment, as ready to crush you as you are to crush him, and quite as
full of pretentious moral reasons for doing it.
In short, when Major Barbara says that there are no scoundrels, she is
right: there are no absolute scoundrels, though there are impracticable
people of whom I shall treat presently. Every practicable man (and
woman) is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a
man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of
what he does, depends on his circumstances. The characteristics that
ruin a man in one class make him eminent in another. The characters
that behave differently in different circumstances behave alike in
similar circumstances. Take a common English character like that of
Bill Walker. We meet Bill everywhere: on the judicial bench, on the
episcopal bench, in the Privy Council, at the War Office and Admiralty,
as well as in the Old Bailey dock or in the ranks of casual unskilled
labor. And the morality of Bill's characteristics varies with these
various circumstances. The faults of the burglar are the qualities of
the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk
his situation. In short, though character is independent of
circumstances, conduct is not; and our moral judgments of character are
not: both are circumstantial. Take any condition of life in which the
circumstances are for a mass of men practically alike: felony, the
House of Lords, the factory, the stables, the gipsy encampment or where
you please! In spite of diversity of character and temperament, the
conduct and morals of the individuals in each group are as predicable
and as alike in the main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals being
mostly only social habits and circumstantial necessities. Strong people
know this and count upon it. In nothing have the master-minds of the
world been distinguished from the ordinary suburban season-ticket
holder more than in their straightforward perception of the fact that
mankind is practically a single species, and not a menagerie of
gentlemen and bounders, villains and heroes, cowards and daredevils,
peers and peasants, grocers and aristocrats, artisans and laborers,
washerwomen and duchesses, in which all the grades of income and caste
represent distinct animals who must not be introduced to one another or
intermarry. Napoleon constructing a galaxy of generals and courtiers,
and even of monarchs, out of his collection of social nobodies; Julius
Caesar appointing as governor of Egypt the son of a freedman--one who
but a short time before would have been legally disqualified for the
post even of a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his
barber his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a
firm hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by
Barbara in the Christian formula that all men are children of one
father. A man who believes that men are naturally divided into upper
and lower and middle classes morally is making exactly the same mistake
as the man who believes that they are naturally divided in the same way
socially. And just as our persistent attempts to found political
institutions on a basis of social inequality have always produced long
periods of destructive friction relieved from time to time by violent
explosions of revolution; so the attempt--will Americans please
note--to found moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality can
lead to nothing but unnatural Reigns of the Saints relieved by
licentious Restorations; to Americans who have made divorce a public
institution turning the face of Europe into one huge sardonic smile by
refusing to stay in the same hotel with a Russian man of genius who has
changed wives without the sanction of South Dakota; to grotesque
hypocrisy, cruel persecution, and final utter confusion of conventions
and compliances with benevolence and respectability. It is quite
useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are
born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of
itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his
moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every
man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any fool can
trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or
as a rascal. This is the lesson Democracy has to learn before it can
become anything but the most oppressive of all the priesthoods.
Let us now return to Bill Walker and his case of conscience against the
Salvation Army. Major Barbara, not being a modern Tetzel, or the
treasurer of a hospital, refuses to sell Bill absolution for a
sovereign. Unfortunately, what the Army can afford to refuse in the
case of Bill Walker, it cannot refuse in the case of Bodger. Bodger is
master of the situation because he holds the purse strings. "Strive as
you will," says Bodger, in effect: "me you cannot do without. You
cannot save Bill Walker without my money." And the Army answers, quite
rightly under the circumstances, "We will take money from the devil
himself sooner than abandon the work of Salvation." So Bodger pays his
conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused to Bill. In
real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the dramatist,
whose business it is to show the connexion between things that seem
apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in real life, have
contrived to make it known to Bill, with the result that the Salvation
Army loses its hold of him at once.
But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip of the
facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste for
blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee that happy
ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of our cities when
the men are not working, but resting and chewing the cud of their
reflections; and he will find that there is one expression on every
mature face: the expression of cynicism. The discovery made by Bill
Walker about the Salvation Army has been made by every one of them.
They have found that every man has his price; and they have been
foolishly or corruptly taught to mistrust and despise him for that
necessary and salutary condition of social existence. When they learn
that General Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because
it is a high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he
shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his character is
unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites and allies of their
sweaters and oppressors. They know that the large subscriptions which
help to support the Army are endowments, not of religion, but of the
wicked doctrine of docility in poverty and humility under oppression;
and they are rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul,
the doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage, and
terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness, humanity,
generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness. The confirmation
of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been working so hard for
years past, is the morality of militarism; and the justification of
militarism is that circumstances may at any time make it the true
morality of the moment. It is by producing such moments that we produce
violent and sanguinary revolutions, such as the one now in progress in
Russia and the one which Capitalism in England and America is daily and
diligently provoking.
At such moments it becomes the duty of the Churches to evoke all the
powers of destruction against the existing order. But if they do this,
the existing order must forcibly suppress them. Churches are suffered
to exist only on condition that they preach submission to the State as
at present capitalistically organized. The Church of England itself is
compelled to add to the thirty-six articles in which it formulates its
religious tenets, three more in which it apologetically protests that
the moment any of these articles comes in conflict with the State it is
to be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and abhorred,
the policeman being a much more important person than any of the
Persons of the Trinity. And this is why no tolerated Church nor
Salvation Army can ever win the entire confidence of the poor. It must
be on the side of the police and the military, no matter what it
believes or disbelieves; and as the police and the military are the
instruments by which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and
moral principles made for the purpose), it is not possible to be on the
side of the poor and of the police at the same time. Indeed the
religious bodies, as the almoners of the rich, become a sort of
auxiliary police, taking off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with
coals and blankets, bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering the
victims with hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness in another
world when the process of working them to premature death in the
service of the rich is complete in this.