I should strenuously recommend the United States to build thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one. This would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having been in the past scattered over the continental countries which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter one another.
If the United States wishes to stop war as an institution, that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will need a very big club for the purpose.
If I were an American statesman I should tell the country flatly that it should maintain a Pacific navy capable of resisting an attack from Japan and an Atlantic navy capable of resisting an attack from England, with Zeppelins on the same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns, and so forth. And until the nations see the suicidal folly of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of battle, no other advice will be honest advice.
In "Major Barbara" Cusins abandons the teaching of Greek to take up the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war on war." It is in this play that is expounded the theory on which President Wilson based his policy. Lady Britomart tells Cusins: "You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." But Undershaft, the munition-maker, replies: "No; none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here." And when Cusins asks: "What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?" he answers:
To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles; to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction.
In this same conversation Shaw also gives a hint of his theology, when Cusins says to Undershaft: "You have no power. You do not drive this place; it drives you. And what drives this place?" Undershaft answers, enigmatically, "A will of which I am a part." This doctrine of an immanent God working through nature and man to higher things was developed more definitely in an address which Mr. Shaw delivered some years ago in the City Temple at the invitation of the Reverend R. J. Campbell. Here he argued that God created human beings to be "his helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." Shaw continues:
If my actions are God's nobody can fairly hold me responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... But if I am a part of God, if my eyes are God's eyes, my hands God's hands, and my conscience God's conscience then also I share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the world goes wrong!
This position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as "the Method of Trial and Error." When Blake asks of the tiger, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Shaw conceives the Life-Force as replying:
Yes, it was the best I could devise at the time; but now that I have evolved something better, part of the work of that something better, Man, to wit, is to kill out my earlier attempt. And in due time I hope to evolve Superman, who will in his turn kill out and supersede Man, whose abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly disappointed me.
In the unactable third act of his "Man and Superman",[1] this theology is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, Don Juan and the Devil. Here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war in all literature. It is, remember, the Devil who is speaking:
I tell you that in the arts of life Man invests nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth. His heart is in his weapons.... Man measures his force by his destructiveness.... In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which they themselves daily walk.... The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.
Three years before the war Shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "Press Cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both Britain and Germany that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production on the stage. Since the British censor seemed to fear that the principal characters, "Balsquith" and "Mitchener", might be taken by the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, Shaw offered to change the names to "Bones" and "Johnson." But even that concession would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of literature, it was published as a book. Here is a bit of the dialogue: