Preface to Major Barbara | Page 9

are rich because others are poor. But they
cannot help that: it is for the poor to repudiate poverty when they have
had enough of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the
demonstrations to the contrary made by the economists, jurists,
moralists and sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend them, or even
doing the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose
only on the hirers.
The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in
defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers
through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob
prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich
men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life--men like Ruskin and
William Morris and Kropotkin--have enormous social appetites and
very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome
houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with
bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain because
the charwoman is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin,
because the sempstress is anemic, because every man they meet is not a
friend and every woman not a romance. They turn up their noses at
their neighbors' drains, and are made ill by the architecture of their
neighbors' houses. Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do not
please them (and they can get nothing else): they cannot sleep nor sit at
ease upon "slaughtered" cabinet makers' furniture. The very air is not
good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They even
demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a

mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally they declare that though
to rob and pill with your own hand on horseback and in steel coat may
have been a good life, to rob and pill by the hands of the policeman, the
bailiff, and the soldier, and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not
a good life, but rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one.
They call on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at their
ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for its "damned
wantlessness" (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).
So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity. The poor
do not share their tastes nor understand their art-criticisms. They do not
want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the contrary, they want
very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities from which the elect
souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit and not by
abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after unwholesome
sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty.
To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number
of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they
prefer the News. The difference between a stockbroker's cheap and
dirty starched white shirt and collar and the comparatively costly and
carefully dyed blue shirt of William Morris is a difference so
disgraceful to Morris in their eyes that if they fought on the subject at
all, they would fight in defence of the starch. "Cease to be slaves, in
order that you may become cranks" is not a very inspiring call to arms;
nor is it really improved by substituting saints for cranks. Both terms
denote men of genius; and the common man does not want to live the
life of a man of genius: he would much rather live the life of a pet
collie if that were the only alternative. But he does want more money.
Whatever else he may be vague about, he is clear about that. He may or
may not prefer Major Barbara to the Drury Lane pantomime; but he
always prefers five hundred pounds to five hundred shillings.
Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that it is
sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of
impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard
for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot
in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the
world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as
conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness,

weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues
is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies
noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some,
and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it
is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse.
For the two things are inseparable: money