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Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring by George Bernard Shaw
page 5 of 139 (03%)
disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic
invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to
impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be
scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and
Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would
listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had
to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the revolution,
as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any
word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the
scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided
them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy
at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie
and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of
playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma's acting as
Candida.

Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a
Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and
stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law,
order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to
put on a headier set of chains; expels anti-militarists with the
blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser
reason to thank heaven that he was born in the comparative
freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the
Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.

Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by
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