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Page 55
UNDERSHAFT. Cleanliness and respectability do not need
justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no
darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw
poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle
and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to
twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look
after the drainage.
BARBARA. And their souls?
UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just as I saved yours.
BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul! What do you mean?
UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care
that you should have money enough to live handsomely--more than
enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That
saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.
BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins!
UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers]
Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children.
Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but
money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are
lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to
become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
CUSINS. Do you call poverty a crime?
UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. 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 souls of all who come within
sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a
murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: 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. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.
Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in
West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition.
Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again
to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by
thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome
street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy
waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting;
before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at
a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative Party.
BARBARA. And will he be the better for that?
UNDERSHAFT. You know he will. Don't be a hypocrite, Barbara. He
will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better
behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That
will be better than an American cloth mattress in a shelter,
chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to
kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill,
I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men
with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I
will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same
terms. Try your hand on my men: their souls are hungry because
their bodies are full.
BARBARA. And leave the east end to starve?
UNDERSHAFT [his energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and
brooding remembrance] I was an east ender. I moralized and
starved until one day I swore that I would be a fullfed free man
at all costs--that nothing should stop me except a bullet,
neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said
"Thou shalt starve ere I starve"; and with that word I became
free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I
am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of
most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of
every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.
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