"Major Barbara" is of still greater social importance, inasmuch as it
points to the fact that while charity and religion are supposed to
minister to the poor, both institutions derive their main revenue from
the poor by the perpetuation of the evils both pretend to fight.
_Major Barbara_, the daughter of the world renowned cannon manufacturer
_Undershaft_, has joined the Salvation Army. The latter lays claim to
being the most humane religious institution, because--unlike other soul
savers--it does not entirely forget the needs of the body. It also
teaches that the greater the sinner the more glorious the saving. But as
no one is quite as black as he is painted, it becomes necessary for
those who want to be saved, and incidentally to profit by the Salvation
Army, to invent sins--the blacker the better.
_Rummy._ What am I to do? I can't starve. Them Salvation lasses is
dear girls; but the better you are the worse they likes to think you
were before they rescued you. Why shouldn't they 'av' a bit o'
credit, poor loves? They're worn to rags by their work. And where
would they get the money to rescue us if we was to let on we're no
worse than other people? You know what ladies and gentlemen are.
_Price._ Thievin' swine!... We're companions in misfortune,
Rummy....
_Rummy._ Who saved you, Mr. Price? Was it Major Barbara?
_Price._ No: I come here on my own. I'm goin' to be Bronterre
O'Brien Price, the converted painter. I know wot they like. I'll
tell 'em how I blasphemed and gambled and wopped my poor old
mother--
_Rummy._ Used you to beat your mother?
_Price._ Not likely. She used to beat me. No matter: you come and
listen to the converted painter, and you'll hear how she was a pious
woman that taught me me prayers at 'er knee, an' how I used to come
home drunk and drag her out o' bed be 'er snow-white 'airs, and lam
into 'er with the poker.
_Rummy._ That's what's so unfair to us women. Your confessions is
just as big lies as ours: you don't tell what you really done no
more than us; but you men can tell your lies right out at the
meetin's and be made much of for it; while the sort o' confessions
we az to make 'as to be whispered to one lady at a time. It ain't
right, spite of all their piety.
_Price._ Right! Do you suppose the Army'd be allowed if it went and
did right? Not much. It combs our 'air and makes us good little
blokes to be robbed and put upon. But I'll play the game as good as
any of 'em. I'll see somebody struck by lightnin', or hear a voice
sayin', "Snobby Price: where will you spend eternity?" I'll 'ave a
time of it, I tell you.
It is inevitable that the Salvation Army, like all other religious and
charitable institutions, should by its very character foster cowardice
and hypocrisy as a premium securing entry into heaven.
_Major Barbara_, being a novice, is as ignorant of this as she is
unaware of the source of the money which sustains her and the work of
the Salvation Army. She consistently refuses to accept the "conscience
sovereign" of _Bill Walker_ for beating up a Salvation lassie. Not so
_Mrs. Baines_, the Army Commissioner. She is dyed in the wool in the
profession of begging and will take money from the devil himself "for
the Glory of God,"--the Glory of God which consists in "taking out the
anger and bitterness against the rich from the hearts of the poor," a
service "gratifying and convenient for all large employers." No wonder
the whisky distiller _Bodger_ makes the generous contribution of 5000
pounds and _Undershaft_ adds his own little mite of another 5000.
_Barbara_ is indeed ignorant or she would not protest against a fact so
notorious:
_Barbara._ Do you know what my father is? Have you forgotten that
Lord Saxmundham is Bodger the whisky man? Do you remember how we
implored the County Council to stop him from writing Bodger's Whisky
in letters of fire against the sky; so that the poor drink-ruined
creatures on the embankment could not wake up from their snatches of
sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked
sky sign? Do you know that the worst thing that I have had to fight
here is not the devil, but Bodger, Bodger, Bodger with his whisky,
his distilleries, and his tied houses? Are you going to make our
shelter another tied house for him, and ask me to keep it?
_Undershaft._ My dear Barbara: alcohol is a very necessary article.
It heals the sick-- ... It assists the doctor: that is perhaps a
less questionable way of putting it. It makes life bearable to
millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were
quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night
that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
_Mrs. Baines._ Barbara: Lord Saxmundham gives us the money to stop
drinking--to take his own business from him.
_Undershaft._ I also, Mrs. Baines, may claim a little
disinterestedness. Think of my business! think of the widows and
orphans! the men and lads torn to pieces with shrapnel and poisoned
with lyddite! the oceans of blood, not one drop of which is shed in
a really just cause! the ravaged crops! the peaceful peasants
forced, women and men, to till their fields under the fire of
opposing armies on pain of starvation! the bad blood of the fierce
cowards at home who egg on others to fight for the gratification of
national vanity! All this makes money for me: I am never richer,
never busier than when the papers are full of it. Well, it is your
work to preach peace on earth and good will to men. Every convert
you make is a vote against war. Yet I give you this money to hasten
my own commercial ruin.
_Barbara._ Drunkenness and Murder! My God, why hast thou forsaked
me?
However, _Barbara's_ indignation does not last very long, any more than
that of her aristocratic mother, _Lady Britomart_, who has no use for
her plebeian husband except when she needs his money. Similarly
_Stephen_, her son, has become converted, like _Barbara_, not to the
Glory Hallelujah of the Salvation Army but to the power of money and
cannon. Likewise the rest of the family, including the Greek Scholar
_Cusins_, _Barbara's_ suitor.
During the visit to their father's factory the Undershaft family makes
several discoveries. They learn that the best modern method of
accumulating a large fortune consists in organizing industries in such a
manner as to make the workers content with their slavery. It's a model
factory.
_Undershaft._ It is a spotlessly clean and beautiful hillside town.
There are two chapels: a Primitive one and a sophisticated one.
There's even an ethical society; but it is not much patronized, as
my men are all strongly religious. In the high explosives sheds they
object to the presence of agnostics as unsafe.
The family further learns that it is not high moral precepts, patriotic
love of country, or similar sentiments that are the backbone of the life
of the nation. It is _Undershaft_ again who enlightens them of the power
of money and its rôle in dictating governmental policies, making war or
peace, and shaping the destinies of man.
_Undershaft._ The government of your country. I am the government of
your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and a half a
dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble
shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do
what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace
when it doesn't. You will find out that trade requires certain
measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want
anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is
a national need. When either people want something to keep my
dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in
return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and
the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government
of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your
caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders
and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to
my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune.... To give
arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect
of persons or principles: to Aristocrat and Republican, to Nihilist
and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic,
to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man, and yellow man,
to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all
follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an order from a
good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer
preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the
rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons: I cannot make courage
and conviction.
That is just it. The Undershafts cannot make conviction and courage; yet
both are indispensable if one is to see that, in the words of
_Undershaft_:
"Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification: they
justify themselves. There are millions of poor people, abject
people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us
morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they
force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural
cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into
their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. I had
rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a
slave, I don't want to be either; but if you force the alternative
on me, then, by Heaven, I'll choose the braver and more moral one. I
hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever."
_Cusins_, the scientist, realizes the force of _Undershaft's_ argument.
Long enough have the people been preached at, and intellectual power
used to enslave them.
_Cusins._ As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons
against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons
against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to
arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary
man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in
authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all
the fools, rascals, and impostors.
This thought is perhaps the most revolutionary sentiment in the whole
play, in view of the fact that the people everywhere are enslaved by the
awe of the lawyer, the professor, and the politician, even more than by
the club and gun. It is the lawyer and the politician who poison the
people with "the germ of briefs and politics," thereby unfitting them
for the only effective course in the great social struggle--action,
resultant from the realization that poverty and inequality never have
been, never can be, preached or voted out of existence.
_Undershaft._ Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to
your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my
machine guns. Don't preach at them; don't reason with them. Kill
them.
_Barbara._ Killing. Is that your remedy for everything?
_Undershaft._ It is the final test of conviction, the only lever
strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying
Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street; and
three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a
certain house in Westminster; and let them go through certain
ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get
the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a
government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is
governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is
the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.... Vote! Bah! When you
vote you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you
pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and
set up new. Is that historically true, Mr. Learned Man, or is it
not?
_Cusins._ It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I
repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every
possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true.
_Undershaft._ Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to
spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn
your oughts into shells, man. Come and make explosives with me. The
history of the world is the history of those who had the courage to
embrace this truth.
"Major Barbara" is one of the most revolutionary plays. In any other but
dramatic form the sentiments uttered therein would have condemned the
author to long imprisonment for inciting to sedition and violence.
Shaw the Fabian would be the first to repudiate such utterances as rank
Anarchy, "impractical, brain cracked and criminal." But Shaw the
dramatist is closer to life--closer to reality, closer to the historic
truth that the people wrest only as much liberty as they have the
intelligence to want and the courage to take.