themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty and obedience
by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the poor
without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart's
knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the
other duties--which indeed are not duties at all when they
conflict with it, but plain wickednesses--behaved bravely,
admirably, and, in the final analysis, public-spiritedly.
Medieval society, on the other hand, behaved very badly indeed in
organizing itself so stupidly that a good life could be achieved
by robbing and pilling. If the knight's contemporaries had been
all as resolute as he, robbing and pilling would have been the
shortest way to the gallows, just as, if we were all as resolute
and clearsighted as Undershaft, an attempt to live by means of
what is called "an independent income" would be the shortest way
to the lethal chamber. But as, thanks to our political imbecility
and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the best
imitation of a good life now procurable is life on an independent
income, all sensible people aim at securing such an income, and
are, of course, careful to legalize and moralize both it and all
the actions and sentiments which lead to it and support it as an
institution. What else can they do? They know, of course, that
they are rich because others are poor. But they cannot help that:
it is for the poor to repudiate poverty when they have had enough
of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the demonstrations to
the contrary made by the economists, jurists, moralists and
sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend them, or even doing
the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose
only on the hirers.

The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in