I sent Mr. Shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No More Kings", in The Independent of March 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article."
This war raises in an acute form the whole question of republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world has the right—indeed the duty—to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation.
All recent historical research has shown that the position of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the British, makes him so strong that George III, who was childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she) should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or be a member of a dynasty.
I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central Empires by making separate national states of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony instead of restraining it.
Perhaps the reader will think that I am rather too presumptuous in professing to know just what Shaw means and believes, when most people are puzzled by him. So I should explain that I have the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Shaw. I may say without boasting—or at least without lying—that at one period of his life I was nearer to him than any other human being. The distance between us was in fact the diameter of one of those round tables in the A. B. C. restaurants, and the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. I resorted to thorough Fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and I wished that either he or I had been a smoker. But although a vegetarian, he eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with Fabian tactics.
The occasion was a recess in a Fabian Society conference. I did not suppose that anything could shut off Socialists in the midst of debate. The theme of discussion was the House of Lords, which the Fabians unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed on the substitute. But while they were iconoclasts as to one British institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in the midst of a lovely scrap.
The Fabian Society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which Thomas Davidson scattered in many lands. You can track this peripatetic philosopher through life, as you can Johnny Appleseed, by the societies that sprung up along his pathway. In the Adirondacks he founded the Glenmore School of Philosophy. In the Jewish quarter of New York City another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of his zeal for learning. The circle of earnest young men and women whom he gathered about him in London were the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the Fabian Society. Yet Davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a Socialist.[5]
At the Fabian Society one sees Shaw in his element. Every creature, says Browning, like the moon,
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
The Fabian Society is Shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a different face than to the outside world. As I watched him during the afternoon—preceding and following the brief period of personal contact of which I have been bragging—I was struck by the tact and kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. There was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic tone which one gets from his writings. He has been not so much the "shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the "wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and inconspicuous work of the organization. He had for twenty-seven years served on the Executive Committee of the society when in 1911 he resigned to make way for the younger generation.
The question under discussion was, as I have said, that of the reconstruction of the House of Lords. This was shortly before the war, when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this, as I remember it:
Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury have our lives and property in their hands.
Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that people should never be governed better than they want to be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but like all superior persons now I have to convince other people because I cannot compel them.
No elected body can possibly be representative, because no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional one. The House of Lords is more representative than the House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low. Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high standard of qualification, and should sit without votes though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.