many who consider themselves the champions of
oppressed nationalities--Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a
strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement.
Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence.
If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag
of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of
the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence
new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists
fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect,
that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all
the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His
ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his
irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist
resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they
were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were
pro-patriots.

But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of
scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely
in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these
reactions. The "progressive" world being in revolt against religion had
naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of
priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw
gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley
and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked
it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him
that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that
scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not
speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly
lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says
somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand
years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The
paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and
even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far
less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an
element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his apparent
exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowled