For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman
also; and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever,
because she makes it clear that her malice is as great as his
own. "Let her have the law of me, as she said she would," says
Bill: "what I done to her is no more on what you might call my
conscience than sticking a pig." This shows a perfectly natural
and wholesome state of mind on his part.	The old woman, like the
law she threatens him with, is perfectly ready to play the game
of retaliation with him: to rob him if he steals, to flog him if
he strikes, to murder him if he kills. By example and precept the
law and public opinion teach him to impose his will on others by
anger, violence, and cruelty, and to wipe off the moral score by
punishment.	That is sound Crosstianity. But this Crosstianity has
got entangled with something which Barbara calls Christianity,
and which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to play the hangman's
game of Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to prosecute a
drunken ruffian; she converses on equal terms with a blackguard
whom no lady could be seen speaking to in the public street: in
short, she behaves as illegally and unbecomingly as possible
under the circumstances. Bill's conscience reacts to this just as
naturally as it does to the old woman's threats. He is placed in
a position of unbearable moral inferiority, and strives by every
means in his power to escape from it, whilst he is still quite
ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by attempting to smash a
mug on her face.	And that is the triumphant justification of
Barbara's Christianity as against our system of judicial
punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and "poetic
justice" of the romantic stage.

For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the
situation is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the
epic of the convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the
Crosstian policeman annihilated by his encounter with the
Christian Valjean. But Bill Walker is not, like Valjean,
romantically changed from a demon into an angel. There are
millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society to-day; and
the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology, desire
to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his character
whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and
another way to another.

In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided
by our commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands:
merciless, unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery
to their competitors and employees, and facing desperately the
worst that their competitors can do to them. The history of the
English factories, the American trusts, the exploitation of
African gold, diamonds, ivory and rubber, outdoes in villainy the
worst that has ever been imagined of the buccaneers of the
Spanish Main. Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust
magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune. The law
every day seizes on unsuccessful scoundrels of this type and
punishes them with a cruelty worse than their own, with the
result that they come out of the torture house more dangerous
than they went in, and renew their evil doing (nobody will employ
them at anything else) until they are again seized, again
tormented, and again let loose, with the same result.

But the successful scoundrel is dealt with very differently, and
very Christianly. He is not only forgiven: he is idolized,
respected, made much of, all but worshipped. Society returns him
good for evil in the most extravagant overmeasure. And with what
result? He begins to idolize himself, to respect himself, to live
up to the treatment he receives. He preaches sermons; he writes
books of the most edifying advice to young men, and actually
persuades himself that he got on by taking his own advice; he
endows educational institutions; he supports charities; he dies
finally in the odor of sanctity, leaving a will which is a
monument of public spirit and bounty. And all this without any
change in his character. The spots of the leopard and the stripes
of the tiger are as brilliant as ever; but the conduct of the
world towards him has changed; and his conduct has changed
accordingly. You have only to reverse your attitude towards him--
to lay hands on his property, revile him, assault him, and he
will be a brigand again in a moment, as ready to crush you as you
are to crush him, and quite as full of pretentious moral reasons
for doing it.

In short, when Major Barbara says that there are no scoundrels,
she is right: there are no absolute scoundrels, though there are
impracticable people of whom I shall treat presently. Every
practicable man (and woman) is a potential scoundrel and a
potential good citizen. What a man is depends on his character;
but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on
his circumstances. The characteristics that ruin a man in one
class make him eminent in another.	The characters that behave
differently in different circumstances behave alike in similar
circumstances. Take a common English character like that of Bill
Walker. We meet Bill everywhere: on the judicial bench, on the
episcopal bench, in the Privy Council, at the War Office and
Admiralty, as well as in the Old Bailey dock or in the ranks of
casual unskilled labor. And the morality of Bill's
characteristics varies with these various circumstances.	The
faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the
manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his
situation. In short, though character is independent of
circumstances, conduct is not; and our moral judgments of
character are not: both are circumstantial. Take any condition of
life in which the circumstances are for a mass of men practically
alike: felony, the House of Lords, the factory, the stables, the
gipsy encampment or where you please! In spite of diversity of
character and temperament, the conduct and morals of the
individuals in each group are as predicable and as alike in the
main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals being mostly only
social habits and circumstantial necessities. Strong people know
this and count upon it. In nothing have the master-minds of the
world been distinguished from the ordinary suburban season-ticket
holder more than in their straightforward perception of the fact
that mankind is practically a single species, and not a menagerie
of gentlemen and bounders, villains and heroes, cowards and
daredevils, peers and peasants, grocers and aristocrats, artisans
and laborers, washerwomen and duchesses, in which all the grades
of income and caste represent distinct animals who must not be
introduced to one another or intermarry.	Napoleon constructing a
galaxy of generals and courtiers, and even of monarchs, out of
his collection of social nobodies; Julius Caesar appointing as
governor of Egypt the son of a freedman--one who but a short time
before would have been legally disqualified for the post even of
a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his barber
his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a
firm hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by
Barbara in the Christian formula that all men are children of one
father. A man who believes that men are naturally divided into
upper and lower and middle classes morally is making exactly the
same mistake as the man who believes that they are naturally
divided in the same way socially. And just as our persistent
attempts to found political institutions on a basis of social
inequality have always produced long periods of destructive
friction relieved from time to time by violent explosions of
revolution; so the attempt--will Americans please note--to found
moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality can lead to
nothing but unnatural Reigns of the Saints relieved by licentious
Restorations; to Americans who have made divorce a public
institution turning the face of Europe into one huge sardonic
smile by refusing to stay in the same hotel with a Russian man of
genius who has changed wives without the sanction of South
Dakota; to grotesque hypocrisy, cruel persecution, and final
utter confusion of conventions and compliances with benevolence
and respectability. It is quite useless to declare that all men
are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a
man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To
guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral
character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every
man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any
fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether
as a prophet or as a rascal. This is the lesson Democracy has to
learn before it can become anything but the most oppressive of
all the priesthoods.

Let us now return to Bill Walker and his case of conscience
against the Salvation Army. Major Barbara, not being a modern
Tetzel, or the treasurer of a hospital, refuses to sell Bill
absolution for a sovereign. Unfortunately, what the Army can
afford to refuse in the case of Bill Walker, it cannot refuse in
the case of Bodger. Bodger is master of the situation because he
holds the purse strings. "Strive as you will," says Bodger, in
effect: "me you cannot do without.	You cannot save Bill Walker
without my money." And the Army answers, quite rightly under the
circumstances, "We will take money from the devil himself sooner
than abandon the work of Salvation." So Bodger pays his
conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused to Bill.
In real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the
dramatist, whose business it is to show the connexion between
things that seem apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of
events in real life, have contrived to make it known to Bill,
with the result that the Salvation Army loses its hold of him at
once.

But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip
of the facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste
for blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee
that happy ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of
our cities when the men are not working, but resting and chewing
the cud of their reflections; and he will find that there is one
expression on every mature face: the expression of cynicism. The
discovery made by Bill Walker about the Salvation Army has been
made by every one of them. They have found that every man has his
price; and they have been foolishly or corruptly taught to
mistrust and despise him for that necessary and salutary
condition of social existence. When they learn that General
Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because it is a
high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he
shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his
character is unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites
and allies of their sweaters and oppressors. They know that the
large subscriptions which help to support the Army are
endowments, not of religion, but of the wicked doctrine of
docility in poverty and humility under oppression; and they are
rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul, the
doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage,
and terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness,
humanity, generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness.
The confirmation of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been
working so hard for years past, is the morality of militarism;
and the justification of militarism is that circumstances may at
any time make it the true morality of the moment. It is by
producing such moments that we produce violent and sanguinary
revolutions, such as the one now in progress in Russia and the
one which Capitalism in England and America is daily and
diligently provoking.

At such moments it becomes the duty of the Churches to evoke all
the powers of destruction against the existing order.	But if they
do this, the existing order must forcibly suppress them. Churches
are suffered to exist only on condition that they preach
submission to the State as at present capitalistically organized.
The Church of England itself is compelled to add to the
thirty-six articles in which it formulates its religious tenets,
three more in which it apologetically protests that the moment
any of these articles comes in conflict with the State it is to
be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and abhorred,
the policeman being a much more important person than any
of the Persons of the Trinity. And this is why no tolerated
Church nor Salvation Army can ever win the entire confidence of
the poor. It must be on the side of the police and the military,
no matter what it believes or disbelieves; and as the police and
the military are the instruments by which the rich rob and
oppress the poor (on legal and moral principles made for the
purpose), it is not possible to be on the side of the poor and of
the police at the same time.	Indeed the religious bodies, as the
almoners of the rich, become a sort of auxiliary police, taking
off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with coals and blankets,
bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering the victims with
hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness in another world when
the process of working them to premature death in the service of
the rich is complete in this.


CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHISM

Such is the false position from which neither the Salvation Army
nor the Church of England nor any other religious organization
whatever can escape except through a reconstitution of society.
Nor can they merely endure the State passively, washing their
hands of its sins. The State is constantly forcing the
consciences of men by violence and cruelty. Not content with
exacting money from us for the maintenance of its soldiers and
policemen, its gaolers and executioners, it forces us to take an
active personal part in its proceedings on pain of becoming
ourselves the victims of its violence. As I write these lines, a
sensational example is given to the world. A royal marriage has
been celebrated, first by sacrament in a cathedral, and then by a
bullfight having for its main amusement the spectacle of horses
gored and disembowelled by the bull, after which, when the bull
is so exhausted as to be no longer dangerous, he is killed by a
cautious matador. But the ironic contrast between the bullfight
and the sacrament of marriage does not move anyone. Another
contrast--that between the splendor, the happiness, the
atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young couple, and
the price paid for it under our abominable social arrangements in
the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of other young
couples--is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr Upton
Sinclair, who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat
packing industries of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of
what is going on all over the world underneath the top layer of
prosperous plutocracy.	One man is sufficiently moved by that
contrast to pay his own life as the price of one terrible blow at
the responsible parties. Unhappily his poverty leaves him also
ignorant enough to be duped by the pretence that the innocent
young bride and bridegroom, put forth and crowned by plutocracy
as the heads of a State in which they have less personal power
than any policeman, and less influence than any chairman of a
trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches his
sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the
bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying
twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all
these, the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging:
had he blown all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it,
not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory,
before, at, and after the fact, to poverty and prostitution, to
such wholesale massacre of infants as Herod never dreamt of, to
plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder and lingering
death--perhaps not one who had not helped, through example,
precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the dynamiter his
well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving every
day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its
unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their
advocates can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without
stripping the mask of justice and humanity from themselves also.
Be it noted that at this very moment there appears the biography
of one of our dukes, who, being Scotch, could argue about
politics, and therefore stood out as a great brain among our
aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's favorite
historical episode, which he declared he never read without
intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding
of the Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by
our respectable classes "the whiff of grapeshot," though
Napoleon, to do him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would
fain have had it forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not
a demon, but a man of like passions with ourselves, by no means
rancorous or cruel as men go, who can doubt that all over the
world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling in "the
whiff of dynamite" (the flavor of the joke seems to evaporate a
little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the class they hate
even as our argute duke hated what he called the mob.

In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid
explosion. All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood!
Tear "the Anarchist beast" to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold.
Imprison him for life.	Let all civilized States band together to
drive his like off the face of the earth; and if any State
refuses to join, make war on it. This time the leading London
newspaper, anti-Liberal and therefore anti-Russian in politics,
does not say "Serve you right" to the victims, as it did, in
effect, when Bobrikofl; and De Plehve, and Grand Duke Sergius,
were in the same manner unofficially fulminated into fragments.
No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye brave Russian
revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess-monstrous!
hideous! hound down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please,
that we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we
may regret it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were
treated. And meanwhile, since we have not yet caught him, let us
soothe our quivering nerves with the bullfight, and comment in a
courtly way on the unfailing tact and good taste of the ladies of
our royal houses, who, though presumably of full normal natural
tenderness, have been so effectually broken in to fashionable
routine that they can be taken to see the horses slaughtered as
helplessly as they could no doubt be taken to a gladiator show,
if that happened to be the mode just now.

Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the
one man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of
human nature is the fulminator, now a hunted wretch, with
nothing, apparently, to secure his triumph over all the prisons
and scaffolds of infuriate Europe except the revolver in his
pocket and his readiness to discharge it at a moment's notice
into his own or any other head. Think of him setting out to find
a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude of human wolves
howling for his blood.	Think also of this: that at the very
first essay he finds what he seeks, a veritable grandee of Spain,
a noble, high-thinking, unterrified, malice-void soul, in the
guise--of all masquerades in the world!--of a modern editor. The
Anarchist wolf, flying from the wolves of plutocracy, throws
himself on the honor of the man. The man, not being a wolf (nor a
London editor), and therefore not having enough sympathy with his
exploit to be made bloodthirsty by it, does not throw him back to
the pursuing wolves--gives him, instead, what help he can to
escape, and sends him off acquainted at last with a force that
goes deeper than dynamite, though you cannot make so much of it
for sixpence. That righteous and honorable high human deed is not
wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits the fugitive
wolf only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently smell
him out. The fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is
nearest; shoots himself; and then convinces the world, by his
photograph, that he was no monstrous freak of reversion to the
tiger, but a good looking young man with nothing abnormal about
him except his appalling courage and resolution (that is why the
terrified shriek Coward at him): one to whom murdering a happy
young couple on their wedding morning would have been an
unthinkably unnatural abomination under rational and kindly human
circumstances.

Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves,
balked of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed
to torture him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing
to fasten his teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him
down until they came to finish him.

Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he
wishes to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude
in that matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces.
Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief
sensation a sanguinary execution after torture, for its central
mystery an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation.
But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms
the sacred mystery of Equality, and forbids the glaring futility
and folly of vengeance, often politely called punishment or
justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is tolerated. The other
is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well aware of the
fact that the only editor in England who denounces punishment as
radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his paper
The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for
blasphemy.


SANE CONCLUSIONS

And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one
side or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim
absurdities. It is not good sense to propose that laws against
crime should apply to principals only and not to accessories
whose consent, counsel, or silence may secure impunity to the
principal. If you institute punishment as part of the law, you
must punish people for refusing to punish. If you have a police,
part of its duty must be to compel everybody to assist the
police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and your policemen
agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable violation
of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be
helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law
if they please, but to make laws that will command the public
assent, and not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers.
Everybody disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when
caught and overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and
often, let us hope, with success, to his captor not to deliver
him over to the useless horrors of penal servitude. In other
cases the lawbreaker escapes because those who could give him up
do not consider his breech of the law a guilty action. Sometimes,
even, private tribunals are formed in opposition to the official
tribunals; and these private tribunals employ assassins as
executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet before he had
established his power officially, and by the Ribbon lodges
of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords.	Under such
circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the
district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray
him, partly because they justify him exactly as the regular
Government justifies its official executioner, and partly because
they would themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him:
another method learnt from the official government. Given a
tribunal, employing a slayer who has no personal quarrel with the
slain; and there is clearly no moral difference between official
and unofficial killing.

In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are
against their consciences, either in the preamble or in the
penalty. In London our worst anarchists are the magistrates,
because many of them are so old and ignorant that when they are
called upon to administer any law that is based on ideas or
knowledge less than half a century old, they disagree with it,
and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen without any
respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of
violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but
when the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an
anarchist. When some huge change in social conditions, such as
the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, throws our legal and industrial institutions out
of date, Anarchism becomes almost a religion. The whole force of
the most energetic geniuses of the time in philosophy, economics,
and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations and reminders that
morality and law are only conventions, fallible and continually
obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and
comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of
the spectators every time they do their duty, appear
simultaneously with economic treatises entitled "What is
Property? Theft!" and with histories of "The Conflict between
Religion and Science."

Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of
living in society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the
individual from a code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the
code he is prepared not only to accept but to uphold as a matter
of such vital importance that a lawbreaker at large is hardly to
be tolerated on any plea. Such an attitude becomes impossible
when the only men who can make themselves heard and remembered
throughout the world spend all their energy in raising our gorge
against current law, current morality, current respect
ability, and legal property.	The ordinary man, uneducated in
social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be
set against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to
regard law in the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once
he is brought to repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he
will repudiate the very conception of law and the very groundwork
of institutions, ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless
methods as "historical," and tolerating nothing except pure
empiricism in conduct, with dynamite as the basis of politics and
vivisection as the basis of science. That is hideous; but what is
to be done?	Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man,
by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual
constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and by
temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit
of old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now
always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law
impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is
organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our
wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes,
our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false
in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good
reasons; but that does not make my attacks any less encouraging
or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad reasons. The
existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about it, some
foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what
worse it could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage
of that worst even from its own point of view is that society,
with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and
starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is
prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our
natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which
every Russian student can make, and every Russian grenadier has
learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that brave and
resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins
for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until
their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is,
simply not to outrage their consciences.

Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make
very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in
a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the
millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or
we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire.
The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of
the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no
crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by
their personal exertions not only a full equivalent for what they
take, but a surplus sufficient to provide for their
superannuation and pay back the debt due for their nurture.

The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious
injuries which now goes on under the name of punishment be
abandoned; so that the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the
beggar, may without inhumanity be handed over to the law, and
made to understand that a State which is too humane to punish
will also be too thrifty to waste the life of honest men in
watching or restraining dishonest ones. That is why we do not
imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first bite.	But
if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal
chamber. That seems to me sensible.	To allow the dog to expiate
his bite by a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much
more savage condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite
again and expiate again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of
human life and happiness in the task of chaining and feeding and
tormenting him, seems to me idiotic and superstitious. Yet that
is what we do to men who bark and bite and steal. It would be far
more sensible to put up with their vices, as we put up with their
illnesses, until they give more trouble than they are worth, at
which point we should, with many apologies and expressions of
sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last
wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of
them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate
their misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a
charity, or to compensate the victims. If there is to be no
punishment there can be no forgiveness. We shall never have real
moral responsibility until everyone knows that his deeds are
irrevocable, and that his life depends on his usefulness.
Hitherto, alas! humanity has never dared face these hard facts.
We frantically scatter conscience money and invent systems of
conscience banking, with expiatory penalties, atonements,
redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and what
not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code.	Not content
with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify human
saviors, and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute
mercy to the inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing
murder by throwing ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and
shrink even from our own gallows because we are forced to admit
that it, at least, is irrevocable--as if one hour of imprisonment
were not as irrevocable as any execution!

If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will
never know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few
men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called
cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in
themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their
minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to
do it. That is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers
whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their
countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt,
reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead
of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy.	Major
Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result
that the ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself.	To
relieve this agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist
whom he tries to provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only
prays for him. Then he tries to pay, but can get nobody to take
his money. His doom is the doom of Cain, who, failing to find
either a savior, a policeman, or an almoner to help him to
pretend that his brother's blood no longer cried from the ground,
had to live and die a murderer. Cain took care not to commit
another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who
kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic
couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to
deserving charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score,
he might possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a
second luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you
may depend on it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning
people with bad whisky, because he can always depend on the
Salvation Army or the Church of England to negotiate a redemption
for him in consideration of a trifling percentage of his profits.
There is a third condition too, which must be fulfilled before
the great teachers of the world will cease to scoff at its
religions. Creeds must become intellectually honest. At present
there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole
world-situation. This play of mine, Major Barbara, is, I hope,
both true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened,
and that faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing
that it is a record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak
according to Scripture, a fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly
denounced and cursed as such by me, the author, to all posterity.

London, June 1906.