Shirley's does
not. Peter Shirley is what we call the honest poor man. Undershaft is
what we call the wicked rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives.
Well, the misery of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of
men act and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted
and believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result
would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy, says
Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am prepared to kill
at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says, the final
test of sincerity. Like Froissart's medieval hero, who saw that "to rob
and pill was a good life," he is not the dupe of that public sentiment
against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who would
otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty
and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the
poor without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart's
knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the other
duties--which indeed are not duties at all when they conflict with it,
but plain wickednesses--behaved bravely, admirably, and, in the final
analysis, public-spiritedly. Medieval society, on the other hand,
behaved very badly indeed in organizing itself so stupidly that a good
life could be achieved by robbing and pilling. If the knight's
contemporaries had been all as resolute as he, robbing and pilling
would have been the shortest way to the gallows, just as, if we were
all as resolute and clearsighted as Undershaft, an attempt to live by
means of what is called "an independent income" would be the shortest
way to the lethal chamber. But as, thanks to our political imbecility
and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the best imitation of
a good life now procurable is life on an independent income, all
sensible people aim at securing such an income, and are, of course,
careful to legalize and moralize both it and all the actions and
sentiments which lead to it and support it as an institution. What else
can they do? They know, of course, that they 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 doi