Preface to Major Barbara | Page 8

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