ization. And that is
why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn
from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic
ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is
enough unless you know what is more than enough").

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my
comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity.
It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions
remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more
by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity,
without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this
initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives,
because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap
misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected
class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then
completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political
power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if
not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage.
Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics;
but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred
masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political
problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional
interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the
mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional
meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial
reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically
international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and
perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that
the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of
attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as
you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or
understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least
comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are
in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are
all now under w