remark. Her vitality, her thrift, her energy, her outspokenness, her
wise care of her daughter, and the managing capacity which has enabled
her and her sister to climb from the fried fish shop down by the Mint
to the establishments of which she boasts, are all high English social
virtues. Her defence of herself is so overwhelming that it provokes the
St James Gazette to declare that "the tendency of the play is wholly
evil" because "it contains one of the boldest and most specious defences
of an immoral life for poor women that has ever been penned." Happily
the St James Gazette here speaks in its haste. Mrs Warren's defence of
herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable.
But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is
no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered
by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved,
overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and RIGHT
for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least
immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer
such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and
immorality, but two sorts of immorality. The man who cannot see
that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as
prostitution--that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and
not merely its misfortunes--is (to put it as politely as possible) a
hopelessly Private Person.

The notion that Mrs Warren must be a fiend is only an example of the
violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex arouses in
undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural for our lawgivers
to punish silly and negligible indecencies with a ferocity unknown in
dealing with, for example, ruinous financial swindling. Had my play been
titled Mr Warren's Profession, and Mr Warren been a bookmaker, nobody
would have expected me to make him a villain as well. Yet gambling is