callously to each citizen: "If you want money, earn it," as if
his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself
alone. We do not even secure for him the opportunity of earning
it: on the contrary, we allow our industry to be organized in
open dependence on the maintenance of "a reserve army of
unemployed" for the sake of "elasticity." The sensible course
would be Cobden-Sanderson's: that is, to give every man enough to
live well on, so as to guarantee the community against the
possibility of a case of the malignant disease of poverty, and
then (necessarily) to see that he earned it.

Undershaft, the hero of Major Barbara, is simply a man who,
having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when
society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative
trade in death and destruction, it offered him, not a choice
between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic
enterprise and cowardly infamy. His conduct stands the Kantian
test, which Peter Shirley's does not. Peter Shirley is what we
call the honest poor man. Undershaft is what we call the wicked
rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives. Well, the misery
of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of men act
and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted and
believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result
would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy,
says Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am
prepared to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness
is, as he says, the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart's
medieval hero, who saw that "to rob and pill was a good life," he
is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is
propagated and endowed by people who would otherwise be killed