ent.

England with her great pioneers of radical thought, the intellectual
pilgrims like Godwin, Robert Owen, Darwin, Spencer, William Morris,
and scores of others; with her wonderful larks of liberty--Shelley,
Byron, Keats--is another example of the influence of dramatic art.
Within comparatively a few years, the dramatic works of Shaw, Pinero,
Galsworthy, Rann Kennedy, have carried radical thought to the ears
formerly deaf even to Great Britain's wondrous poets. Thus a public
which will remain indifferent reading an essay by Robert Owen, on
Poverty, or ignore Bernard Shaw's Socialistic tracts, was made to
think by MAJOR BARBARA, wherein poverty is described as the greatest
crime of Christian civilization. "Poverty makes people weak,
slavish, puny; poverty creates disease, crime, prostitution; in fine,
poverty is responsible for all the ills and evils of the world."
Poverty also necessitates dependency, charitable organizations,
institutions that thrive off the very thing they are trying to
destroy. The Salvation Army, for instance, as shown in MAJOR
BARBARA, fights drunkenness; yet one of its greatest contributors is
Badger, a whiskey distiller, who furnishes yearly thousands of pounds
to do away with the very source of his wealth. Bernard Shaw,
therefore, concludes that the only real benefactor of society is a
man like Undershaft, Barbara's father, a cannon manufacturer, whose
theory of life is that powder is stronger than words.

"The worst of crimes," says Undershaft, "is poverty. All the other
crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are chivalry
itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible
pestilences; strikes dead the very soul of all who come within sight,
sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing; a murder
here, a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: what do they
matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are
not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are
millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed,
ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically; they kill
the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own
liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should
rise against us and drag us down into their abyss.... Poverty and
slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading
articles; they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't pre