vil to
be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft,
demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of
the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.

Once take your eyes from the ends of the earth and fix them on this
truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft's views will not
perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he is
only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes
wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are
walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity.
All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them
Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect
comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover the
Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. That, however, is not
new, even on the stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that article
in Undershaft's religion which recognizes in Money the first need and
in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.

This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained per saltum.
Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man born beyond the
Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own department the greatest
English writer of the latter half of the XIX century, steadily
inculcated the necessity and morality of a conscientious Laodiceanism
in religion and of an earnest and constant sense of the importance of
money. It drives one almost to despair of English literature when one
sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler's posthumous
Way of All Flesh making so little impression that when, some years
later, I produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free
and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with
nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am only too
thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand.
Really, the English do not deserve to have great men. They allowed
Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a comparatively
insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by the nose into an
advertisement of me which has made my own life a burden. In Sicily
there is a Via Samuele Butler. When an English tourist sees it, he
either asks "Who the devil was Samuele Butler?" or wonders why the
Sicilians should perpetuate the memory of the author of Hudibras.

Well, it cannot be denie