Preface to Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

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.