n wrath against the slum landlord, the slum
landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not
of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young
gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they
live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else's labor. The
notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren
is as silly as the notion--prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in
Temperance circles--that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of
the publican. Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable
daughter who cannot endure her. Her indifference to the ultimate social
consequences of her means of making money, and her discovery of that
means by the ordinary method of taking the line of least resistance to
getting it, are too common in English society to call for any special
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 slighte