of the religious impostor.

THE GOSPEL OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT

It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with Major
Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire
Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and
spiritually as well 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, y