hole nation from its vicious, lazy, competitive
anarchy: this discovery has been made by everyone except the Pharisees
and (apparently) the professional playgoers, who still wear their Tom
Hood shirts and underpay their washerwomen without the slightest
misgiving as to the elevation of their private characters, the purity
of their private atmospheres, and their right to repudiate as foreign
to themselves the coarse depravity of the garret and the slum. Not that
they mean any harm: they only desire to be, in their little private
way, what they call gentlemen. They do not understand Barbara's lesson
because they have not, like her, learnt it by taking their part in the
larger life of the nation.

BARBARA'S RETURN TO THE COLORS.

Barbara's return to the colors may yet provide a subject for the
dramatic historian of the future. To go back to the Salvation Army with
the knowledge that even the Salvationists themselves are not saved yet;
that poverty is not blessed, but a most damnable sin; and that when
General Booth chose Blood and Fire for the emblem of Salvation instead
of the Cross, he was perhaps better inspired than he knew: such
knowledge, for the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, will clearly lead to
something hopefuller than distributing bread and treacle at the expense
of Bodger.

It is a very significant thing, this instinctive choice of the military
form of organization, this substitution of the drum for the organ, by
the Salvation Army. Does it not suggest that the Salvationists divine
that they must actually fight the devil instead of merely praying at
him? At present, it is true, they have not quite ascertained his
correct address. When they do, they may give a very rude shock to that
sense of security which he has gained from his experience of the fact
that hard words, even when uttered by eloquent essayists and lecturers,
or carried unanimously at enthusiastic public meetings on the motion of
eminent reformers, break no bones. It has been said that the French
Revolution was the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopedists.
It seems to me to have been the work of men who had observed that
virtuous indignation, caustic criticism, conclusive argument and
instructive pamphleteering, even when done by the most earnest and
witty literary geniuses, were as useless as praying, things going
steadily from bad to worse whilst the Social Contract and the pamphlets
of Voltaire were at the height of their vogue.