Preface to Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with Major / Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire / Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and / spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible / natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the / greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our / first duty -- a duty to which every other consideration should be / sacrificed -- is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable / poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drunken / but amiable," "fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker," "splendidly / criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, / cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs / over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons / from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police / force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children / starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might / feed and clothe them.

It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil is an / evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him a malicious / injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not suppose that it / needed any exceptional clearness of wit to recognize in this an act of / diabolical cruelty. But in England such a recognition provokes a stare / of surprise, followed by an explanation that the outrage is punishment / or justice or something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated / attempt to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds / if such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were not / committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this were true, / which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our own to the / crimes from which we suffer is not helpless submission. Chickenpox is / an evil; but if I were to declare that we must either submit to it or / else repress it sternly by seizing everyone who suffers from it and / punishing them by inoculation with smallpox, I should be laughed at; / for though nobody could deny that the result would be to prevent / chickenpox to some extent by making people avoid it much more / carefully, and to effect a further apparent prevention by making them / conceal it very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see / that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil, and / must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and hygienic / measures.