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