have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange
a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as
an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book
is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one
man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds'
machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world,
until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a
breath of air and looked at the light. The book is merely a
life-preserver--that is all; and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the
man is representative, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is.
Anybody else who can use it is welcome to it.

* * * * *

The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this
world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be
expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists
in wanting it still harder and still harder until one can express it.

This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new world. Here
are all these other people who have to be asked. And until one wants it
hard enough to say it, to get it outside one's self, possibly make it
catching, nothing happens.

If one were to point out one trait rather than another that makes
Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or
literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has
never wanted anything.

If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which Mr. Shaw had