verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines took the money, but
because Barbara refused it.

On the point that the Army ought not to take such money, its
justification is obvious. It must take the money because it cannot
exist without money, and there is no other money to be had. Practically
all the spare money in the country consists of a mass of rent,
interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime,
drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as
inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and
national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as
tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition. None the less the
fact that all our money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest
young souls when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them
conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the
Established Church first realizes that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners
receive the rents of sporting public houses, brothels, and sweating
dens; or that the most generous contributor at his last charity sermon
was an employer trading in female labor cheapened by prostitution as
unscrupulously as a hotel keeper trades in waiters' labor cheapened by
tips, or commissionaire's labor cheapened by pensions; or that the only
patron who can afford to rebuild his church or his schools or give his
boys' brigade a gymnasium or a library is the son-in-law of a Chicago
meat King, that young clergyman has, like Barbara, a very bad quarter
hour. But he cannot help himself by refusing to accept money from
anybody except sweet old ladies with independent incomes and gentle and
lovely ways of life. He has only to follow up the income of the sweet
ladies to its industrial source, and there he will find Mrs Warren's
profession and the poisonous canned meat and all the rest of it. His
own stipend has the same root. He must either share the world's guilt
or go to another planet. He must save the world's honor if he is to
save his own. This is what all the Churches find just as the Salvation
Army and Barbara find it in the play. Her discovery that she is her
father's accomplice; that the Salvation Army is the accomplice of the
distiller and the dynamite maker; that they can no more escape one
another than they can escape the air they breathe; that there is no
salvation for them through personal righteousness, but only through the
redemption of the w