f you attack an existing morality, the public
will inevitably think you are advocating the corresponding
"immorality" as popularly understood; and one suspects that Mr. Shaw
has, from this natural misunderstanding, more to answer for than he
himself dreams of. When he calls himself "an immoralist," he means
that he is the true moralist; that he is going to substitute for a
decayed, outworn, conventional, and stupid morality, a morality based
upon a rational human principle--a morality that will make society
better and more tolerable. In this particular essay he asks us to get
rid of the idea that the family, _as at present constituted_, is the
highest form of human co-partnership. "The people who talk and write
as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love
continuously from the cradle to the grave can hardly have given five
minutes' serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition."

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a
cage is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation
lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and
spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its
false social pretences, its endless grudges and squabbles, its
sacrifice of the boy's future by setting him to earn money to
help the family when he should be in training for his adult life
(remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the
girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents,
its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels
of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or
beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young
hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and
all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise
from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits
and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of
honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against
them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice.

But when Mr. Shaw begins to reconstruct, and thinks that the whole
matter can be solved by such simple--and so far as they go,
excellent--economic expedients as making women economically
independent, and legitimising children, he ceases to be persuasive.
There comes a point when brilliant cleverness and sheer logic _from
necessity_ miss the truth. It