Preface to "Major Barbara" BY G. BERNARD SHAW (Irish dramatist and critic, born 1856; recognized as one of the world's most brilliant advocates of Socialism) THE thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be embraced as St. Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for "the undeserving": let him be poor. Serves him right! Also-somewhat inconsistently-blessed are the poor! It Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation's manhood into scrofula, mud; and the cold which came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room. They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside, or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness-and that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, deathdealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a spectre born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel, iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning—when they would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree. The Sad Sight of the hungry BY LI HUNG CHANG (A poem by the Chinese statesman, 1823-1901; known as the "Bismarck of Asia," and said to have been the richest man in the world) 'WOULD please me, gods, if you would spare 'TWOU Mine eyes from all this hungry stare That fills the face and eyes of men Who search for food o'er hill and glen. Their eyes are orbs of dullest fire, Such looks, O gods, are not from thee! "Bread, bread," they cry, these weary men, But where is it in all the land? Unless the gods with gen'rous hand The Right to be Lazy BY PAUL LAFARGUE (A well-known Socialist writer of France. He and his wife, finding themselves helpless from old age and penury, committed suicide together) OES any one believe that, because the toilers of the DOES time of the medieval guilds worked five days out of seven in a week, they lived upon air and water only, as the deluding political economists tell us? Go to! They had leisure to taste of earthly pleasure, to cherish love, to make and to keep open house in honor of the great God, Leisure. In those days, that morose, hypo |