Voices in Time

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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?

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