over, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will
by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or
poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose
failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying
Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a
hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really
shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in
the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into
each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by
indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality.
Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of
ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically
conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the
abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate
piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens
fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave
the place, in every way refreshed.

In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an
extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a
world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for
being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding
Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no
non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to
that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its
heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but
which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility
to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one
forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before
the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be
happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He
went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by
their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the
whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in _Public Opinion_,
to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the
philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could
never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before