UNDERSHAFT Come, come, my daughter! dont make too much of your little tinpot tragedy. What do we do here when we spend years of work and thought and thousands of pounds of solid cash on a new gun or an aerial battleship that turns out just a hairsbreadth wrong after all? Scrap it. Scrap it without wasting another hour or another pound on it. Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesnt fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year. Dont persist in that folly. If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow.
BARBARA Oh how gladly I would take a better one to my soul! But you offer me a worse one.
[Turning on him with sudden vehemence.]
Justify yourself: shew me some light through the darkness of this dreadful place, with its beautifully clean workshops, and respectable workmen, and model homes.
UNDERSHAFT Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
BARBARA And their souls?
UNDERSHAFT I save their souls just as I saved yours.
BARBARA
[revolted]
You saved my soul! What do you mean?
UNDERSHAFT I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely—more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.
BARBARA
[bewildered]
The seven deadly sins!
UNDERSHAFT Yes, the deadly seven.
[Counting on his fingers.)
Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
CUSINS Do you call poverty a crime?
UNDERSHAFT The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But 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. Pah!
[turning on Barbara]
you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting;
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before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League
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meeting, and join the Conservative Party.
BARBARA And will he be the better for that?
UNDERSHAFT You know he will. Dont be a hypocrite, Barbara. He will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That will be better than an American cloth
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mattress in a shelter, chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill, I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Ma hometanism on the same terms. Try your hand on m y men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full.
BARBARA And leave the east end to starve?
UNDERSHAFT
[his energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and brooding remembrance] I
was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs—that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said “Thou shalt starve ere I starve”; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.
LADY BRITOMART Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is not the place for them.
UNDERSHAFT
[punctured]
My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas.
LADY BRITOMART Your ideas are nonsense. You got on because you were selfish and unscrupulous.
UNDERSHAFT Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I dont 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. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Dont preach at them: dont 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;
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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.
CUSINS That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.
UNDERSHAFT 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 shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?
LADY BRITOMART Barbara, I positively forbid you to listen to your father’s abominable wickedness. And you, Adolphus, ought to know better than to go about saying that wrong things are true. What does it matter whether they are true if they are wrong?
UNDERSHAFT What does it matter whether they are wrong if they are true?
LADY BRITOMART [rising] Children: come home instantly. Andrew: I am exceedingly sorry I allowed you to call on us. You are wickeder than ever. Come at once.
BARBARA
[shaking her head]
It’s no use running away from wicked people, mamma.
LADY BRITOMART It is every use. It shews your disapprobation of them.
BARBARA It does not save them.
LADY BRITOMART I can see that you are going to disobey me. Sarah: are you coming home or are you not?
SARAH I daresay it’s very wicked of papa to make cannons; but I dont think I shall cut him on that account.
LOMAX [
pouring oil on the troubled waters
] The fact is, you know, there is a certain amount of tosh about this notion of wickedness. It doesnt work.You must look at facts. Not that I would say a word in favor of anything wrong; but then, you see, all sorts of chaps are always doing all sorts of things; and we have to fit them in somehow, dont you know. What I mean is that you cant go cutting everybody; and thats about what it comes to.
[Their rapt attention to his eloquence makes him nervous.]
Perhaps I dont make myself clear.
LADY BRITOMART You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and encourage him in his wickedness.
LOMAX
[unruffled]
Well, where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered, dont you know.
[To UNDERSHAFT. ]
Eh? What?
UNDERSHAFT Precisely. By the way, may I call you Charles?
LOMAX Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.
UNDERSHAFT
[to LADY BRITOMART]
Biddy—
LADY BRITOMART
[violently]
Dont dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and m y conscience is clear, at all events
[she sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks the chair].
UNDERSHAFT My dear: you are the incarnation of morality. [She
snorts.] Your
conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names. Come, Euripides! it is getting late; and we all want to get home. Make up your mind.
CUSINS Understand this, you old demon—
LADY BRITOMART Adolphus!
UNDERSHAFT Let him alone, Biddy. Proceed, Euripides.
CUSINS You have me in a horrible dilemma. I want Barbara.
UNDERSHAFT Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.
BARBARA Quite true, Dolly.
CUSINS I also want to avoid being a rascal.
UNDERSHAFT
[with biting contempt]
You lust for personal righteousness, for self-approval, for what you call a good conscience, for what Barbara calls salvation, for what I call patronizing people who are not so lucky as yourself.
CUSINS I do not: all the poet in me recoils from being a good man. But there are things in me that I must reckon with: pity—
UNDERSHAFT Pity! The scavenger of misery.
CUSINS Well, love.
UNDERSHAFT I know. You love the needy and the outcast: you love the oppressed races, the negro, the Indian ryot,
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the Pole, the Irishman. Do you love the Japanese? Do you love the Germans? Do you love the English?
CUSINS No. Every true Englishman detests the English. We are the wickedest nation on earth; and our success is a moral horror.
UNDERSHAFT That is what comes of your gospel of love, is it?
CUSINS May I not love even my father-in-law?
UNDERSHAFT Who wants your love, man? By what right do you take the liberty of offering it to me? I will have your due heed and respect, or I will kill you. But your love. Damn your impertinence!
CUSINS
[grinning]
I may not be able to control my affections, Mac.
UNDERSHAFT You are fencing, Euripides. You are weakening: your grip is slipping. Come! try your last weapon. Pity and love have broken in your hand: forgiveness is still left.
CUSINS No: forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. I am with you there: we must pay our debts.
UNDERSHAFT Well said. Come! you will suit me. Remember the words of Plato.
CUSINS
[starting]
Plato! You dare quote Plato to m e!
UNDERSHAFT Plato says, my friend, that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.
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CUSINS Oh, tempter, cunning tempter!
UNDERSHAFT Come! choose, man, choose.
CUSINS But perhaps Barbara will not marry me if I make the wrong choice.
BARBARA Perhaps not.
CUSINS
[desperately perplexed]
You hear!
BARBARA Father: do you love nobody?
UNDERSHAFT I love my best friend.
LADY BRITOMART And who is that, pray?
UNDERSHAFT My bravest enemy. That is the man who keeps me up to the mark.
CUSINS You know, the creature is really a sort of poet in his way. Suppose he is a great man, after all!
UNDERSHAFT Suppose you stop talking and make up your mind, my young friend.
CUSINS But you are driving me against my nature. I hate war.
UNDERSHAFT Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war? Here are the means: my friend Mr. Lomax is sitting on them.
LOMAX
[springing up]
Oh I say! You dont mean that this thing is loaded, do you? My ownest: come off it.
SARAH
[sitting placidly on the shell]
If I am to be blown up, the more thoroughly it is done the better. Dont fuss, Cholly.
LOMAX
[to UNDERSHAFT, strongly remonstrant]
Your own daughter, you know.