LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
MR. BERNARD SHAW'S DEFINITIONS
[To the Editor of the Senetteron.] SIR,—Mr. Hamilton asks me if Socialism means that I will draw the same income as a programme seller. Certainly it does. Why should I have less ? At present, when I am working on a play, neither I nor the programme seller get anything for it. When I cease working, and the programme seller begins, I get from one hundred and fifty to several hundred times as much as the programme seller, our human needs being practically the same. This is obviously an insane arrangement : anyone deliberately proposing it as an inten- tional and ordered distribution of income would be sent to an asylum. I shall not trifle with Mr. Hamilton by pretending that he approves of it. But since he does not approve of a fifty-fifty division as between me and the programme seller, will he give us his own figures, and the reasoning by which he arrives at them ? An excessive veneration for distinguished dramatists, and an undeserved contempt for programme sellers, or an extravagant admiration for programme sellers and a pious horror of playwrights, may seek to express itself by giving the one more dinners than the other in spite of the natural fact that neither of them can eat more than one ; but it is no use Mr. Hamilton telling us merely that he feels like that. He must decide how many more dinners. How much should -I have ; and how much the programme seller ? How much Dean Inge, and how much Jack Dempsey ? Granted that it is right that we should keep Dr. Inge decently poor whilst making Mr. Dempsey monstrously rich, what exact proportion of income should we aim at as between them. I say fifty-fifty. Mr. Hamilton says— ?
Mr. Hamilton reads the Spectator. This is a guarantee that he is an educated man, intelligently interested in public questions. Yet he confesses that he does not know the meaning of the words national vitality. The possibility of so stupendous an ignorance would, in my opinion, condemn the capitalist system which has produced it even if there were nothing else against it.
I am sorry Mr. Hamilton has lost money by investing it in Russia. I have lost some myself by investing it patriotically at home. But what could Mr. Hamilton expect if he risked his capital on the stability of the Tsardom ? I could have warned him that the security was a rotten one.
By the way, I was represented by an incredulous compositor as giving the received pronunciation of Socialism as Soashlism. But that would have been far too near the mark to call for comment. What I wrote was Soashlim. I should, perhaps, have written Soashlni. I do not complain ; dropping an " s " is no worse than dropping an " h " ; and both save time and articulation. But it is useful to have these phonetic facts on record.—I am, Sir, &c., G. BERNARD SHAW, 10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C. 2.
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