Preface to Major Barbara | Page 7

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