ness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw
poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle
and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to
twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look
after the drainage.

BARBARA. And their souls?

UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just as I saved yours.

BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul! What do you mean?

UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care
that you should have money enough to live handsomely--more than
enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That
saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.

BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins!

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers]
Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children.
Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but
money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are
lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to
become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.

CUSINS. Do you call poverty a crime?

UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues
beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by
comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible
pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within
sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a
murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what
do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of
life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in
London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people,
dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally
and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us
to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural
cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down
into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.
Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in
West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition.
Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again
to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight
shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent
job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months
a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he
will shak