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Title: The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home.
   A Lecture.
Author: Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)
Date of first publication: 1933
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Constable, 1933
Date first posted: 28 March 2011
Date last updated: 28 March 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #759

This ebook was produced by  Barbara Watson, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                                 _THE_
                          POLITICAL MADHOUSE
                            IN AMERICA AND
                              NEARER HOME

                              _A Lecture
                                  by_
                             BERNARD SHAW



                            CONSTABLE & CO
                              LONDON 1933




                               COPYRIGHT
                          GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
                                 1933

               _All rights fully protected and reserved_



        PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED
                            BUNGAY, SUFFOLK




AN EXPLANATION


By republishing in England a harangue addressed specifically to
Americans in America I lay myself open to an accusation of wantonly
holding up my sensitive American friends to British ridicule and
contempt, not for their own good, which was my excuse in New York, but
solely to gratify our British conceit of moral superiority and the
vicious pleasure taken by the meanest of us in the defamation of persons
not born in England (mostly in slums).

I am guiltless of any such incivility. It is to rebuke nationalist
_Schadenfreude_ that I have consented to supply a British counterpart to
the edition of my address now circulating in the United States. It would
be the silliest hypocrisy to keep up the pleasantry of implying, as I
did at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on the 11th of last
April, that the follies and futilities I ascribed to our American
cousins are peculiar to their Continent. To please my American audience
I made fun of the Hundredpercent American; but the truth is that the Hpc
American is a harmless and well-meaning child compared to the Hpc
Englishman, Frenchman, German Nazi, or Japanese. The most complete and
colossal example of the Hpc American I can recollect was the late
William Jennings Bryan, Bi-Metallist, Fundamentalist, and Hot Air
Volcano. Shut him off from the rest of the world and measure him by an
American scale and it is easy for me or any other critic to make him
appear futile as a statesman, absurd as a thinker, and gaseous as an
orator. But place him against the sinister figures of the leading
British and Continental Hpcs of his generation and it becomes at once
apparent that civilization would be much safer in the hands of a batch
of Bryans than in theirs. Bryan never said "My country, right or wrong,"
though he may have sung "My country, 'tis of thee." He never declared
that the manifest divine destiny of the entire human race is to be
governed by rich young Americans trained in the public schools and
universities of the United States. He never came back from a Geneva
International Conference and said that of course the United States came
first with him, nor sat at a Peace Conference declaring that absolute
security for the country in which he happened to be born comes before
every other consideration, such absolute security being attainable only
by the extermination of everybody except his compatriots, and
incidentally of his God (if he believed in one). If he was infatuated
about silver he was at least faithful to it, and never won a general
election by rallying the nation to its defence immediately before
announcing that he was going to save the nation by repudiating it. He
did not proclaim the sacredness of ethnographical frontiers, and then,
after sacrificing millions of lives to re-establish them, use his
victory to establish military frontiers more pregnant with future wars
than those he had sworn to redress. In short, Bryan might well pass for
an angel of light in contrast with the nationalist patriots of the old
world, with their hands against every man and every man's hand against
them (except at Peace Conferences where all the said hands slipped
surreptitiously into one another's pockets), their reproaches to honest
Pacifists for being the friends of every country but their own, and
their pride in the alternative of being the enemies of every country but
their own. If I have said, as indeed I have, that the Hpc American is an
idiot, he may well smile as he wrings my hand cordially for the
hundredth time and replies with a smile "At least, dear friend, you do
not call me a scoundrel as well."

The main points of my harangue obviously apply to England as urgently as
to the United States. As I write, a folly called The World Economic
Conference is collapsing in London in an ignominy of failure and
futility even greater than that of all the other Conferences by which
our Parliament men try to stave off imminent disasters by another bout
of talking round them. Obviously a World Economic Conference can succeed
only on the assumption by its delegates that under all circumstances two
and two make four, always have done so, and always will do so. The
delegates in our Museum of Fossils, appropriately selected for their
place of meeting, assumed, on the contrary, that the fate of their
countries, and finally of the world, is continually being staked on the
question whether two and two will make plus fifty million or minus five
thousand, as on no other assumption is it worth a financier's while to
add two and two together at all. The Conference was bound in the face of
Nature to assume that the world must live from hand to mouth on the
year's harvest, and can by no sleight of financial or other magic obtain
a single grain of wheat from any future year's crop nor a slice from any
future year's lamb. But the delegates all accepted as a familiar and
unquestionable fact that the next twenty years' harvests are at the
immediate disposal of everyone who can pay for them in paper money. The
Conference depended on an unshakeable conviction that all real trade is
a barter of goods and necessary services, and that where there is no
exchange there is robbery. Yet to the delegates trade was only a game at
which the player who won the most paper money and lost the most goods
was the winner. Nothing could differentiate the Conference from a
conspiracy of brigands but a common aspiration to the utmost possible
production and cheapening of the necessities and luxuries of a decent
life. But the delegates with one voice declared that the only thing that
can save the world is a general rise in prices and the destruction by
natural calamity or deliberate sabotage of the existing supply of food
for lack of which thirty millions of unemployed are perishing by inches.
After that it is a mere anti-climax to mention that though sane finance
depends on an unsleeping sense that credit is only an opinion, and that
men can neither eat it, drink it, nor build houses with it, all the
delegates believed that credit is a nourishing and succulent diet, and
that as a man with food, drink, and bricks and mortar to the value of a
thousand pounds has credit for that sum with his banker, he has in
effect a thousand pounds in goods plus a thousand pounds credit, and is
therefore "worth" two thousand pounds. "Credit schemes" on this basis
are enjoying quite a vogue at present. Straitened nations ask, not for
goods, but for credits.

I have not time to complete the analysis of the dust storm of delusions
which constituted the mental equipment of the delegates. The Russian
delegate was the only one who proceeded on mentionable assumptions; and
he confessed that his reason was giving way under the strain of having
to argue with a World Conference of incurable lunatics. He was saved by
his sense of humor; but his sense of humor could not save the world
situation. The lunatics have gone home to their respective national
asylums; but they are still in charge there; and if our affairs are not
taken out of their hands we shall go to smash. For their greatest lunacy
of all is that not one of them can see the smallest reason why any human
being should be allowed to live unless in addition to supporting himself
he can produce a privately appropriable profit for a shareholder or a
rent for a landlord. Why, they argue, should anyone organize the work of
propertyless men merely to produce their own food? Rather let them
perish, or, if they shew signs of muttering "Thou shalt starve ere I
starve," let the tax collector collect some crumbs for them from the
owners' tables. At such a point youths of spirit become car bandits and
racketeers and kidnappers. What else do our crazy conference-mongers
expect? It is easy to say "If you cannot produce a profit get off the
earth: you have no right to live." Proletarians are so blind to this
point of view that in the final issue they reply "Que messieurs les
assassins commencent."

I therefore conciliate my American friends by inviting my English ones
to apply everything I say of the Americans in this book to themselves
with the assurance that they deserve it no less, and that their day of
judgment may be no further off, if so far.

                                                      G. B. S.

    _Ayot St. Lawrence,
      16th July, 1933._




Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Finding myself in an opera house
with such a magnificent and responsive audience, I feel an irresistible
temptation to sing. But I am afraid my unfortunate age precludes any
performance of that kind.

I drag in the subject of my age because it has something to do with what
I am going to say to-night. I am, of course, perfectly aware of how old
men try to foist on the public the decay of their intellects and all the
rest of their senile shortcomings as valuable qualities, the possession
of which gives them special authority.

Dont you believe them, ladies and gentlemen. It does not give them any
authority except on one subject. The sole advantage my age gives me over
the majority of my audience is that I have actually seen about three
generations of human beings.

I was born seventy-seven years ago into a world of what seemed to me to
be very grown-up and middle-aged and old people; and in the course of
time I had to grow up myself. I have carried infants in my arms, and
seen those infants enlarge themselves and have infants of their own and
become elderly or middle aged, and finally die. And therefore I can look
back and speak with first-hand experience of generations of people whom
you never met.

I can remember the sort of person an American was, say, in the year
1861. I was already old enough to read the newspapers and to see in them
every day the heading, THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

The American of that day was quite unlike the American of to-day, thank
Heaven! I dare say all of you young people must be a little puzzled by a
curious figure that still turns up from time to time in your political
caricatures--I mean the figure of Uncle Jonathan. I have been in the
United States now for some days; but I have not yet seen a single
individual who bears the very remotest resemblance to Uncle Jonathan.

Uncle Jonathan is dead. He is gone: he has vanished. But when I was a
boy Uncle Jonathan really did exist. The Americans of those days were
not really Americans at all. They were emigrants; they were provincials;
they were people bringing to America the habits of an old country and an
old civilization: all the bad habits as well as the good ones. They were
setting up for themselves as a first-hand nation in second-hand clothes
with a very uneasy self-consciousness which made them ridiculously
sensitive to any remarks made by foreigners about them.

Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise
out of an American by telling him something about himself which is
equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at
once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that
people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily
superior to such weaknesses.

This exiled British provincial who was not a genuine American, but an
immigrant from another country, this man who had nothing distinctively
American about him except the name of Yankee, this villager who had the
sort of education a Christian missionary gives to a Negro child, with
the corresponding primitive culture: this was the bygone American of
seventy-five years ago.

He went on for a long time trying to do the things that Europe was
doing, and doing them very badly, I may remark, though generally very
expensively. But at last there emerged a sort of American amazingly
unlike Uncle Jonathan, or any other sort of man on earth. To begin with,
he was considerably fleshier; but beyond that he was something which it
is very hard to describe.

He was a colossal person: he was an extremely dignified person. When you
met him, you felt that here was a man of commanding importance: a man
who had something in him. But you never could get that something out of
him. He was a tremendous talker, a rhetorician of magnificent periods
and splendid perorations, an orator who shouted at meetings and
pontificated at dinner tables at great length. But he never said
anything. It was pure oratory for oratory's sake: a branch of Art for
Art's sake. You cheered him enthusiastically, and felt that now
something was going to happen at last. It never did.

He was a bombinating sort of man, if I may coin the expression. He was
monumental; but he was so void of anything new or different that we in
Europe staggered when we contemplated his immensity and its utter
insignificance. We said, what is the secret of this tremendous man, who
talks so splendidly and has nothing to say? This man whose mind,
although it is evidently an intensely live mind, might just as well be
an intense absence of mind, because he doesnt seem to know anything of
any particular consequence. He is always in a state of vociferous
excitement about entirely trivial things. He quotes the poets
thunderously to give point to piffle.

I am very much tempted to mention one famous American, now deceased, who
was true to this type; but I need not, because all of you will be
able--those of you, at any rate, who are getting on a little in life--to
put a name to him. You will say "Oh yes: he means So-and-So, Senator
So-and-So or Congressman So-and-So," or some as yet unelected monument.

Now, what was wrong with this sort of man was that he had no
intellectual bearings. He had no general modern theory of society. He
had no American theory of American society. If I may borrow an
expression from my friend Professor Archibald Henderson, who is a
mathematician, he had no frame of reference. He had no scientific
postulates of any kind. He was in the air; consequently you got nothing
out of him but wind--though it is true you got a terrific quantity of
that.

Such was--and is--the human phenomenon who emerged from the old Uncle
Jonathans, and astonished the world as the Hundredpercent American. He
was unique. I have travelled a good deal; but I never saw in any other
country anybody like the Hundredpercent American.

He presented himself to Europe as a dogmatic politician; and it was
precisely as a dogmatic politician that he was a complete failure. What
was wrong with him was that he had no political constitution to which he
could refer his dogmas.

Now if you had told him that, he would have come as near fainting as is
possible to a monument. He would have said "What! no political
constitution? No such thing as a constitution in America! Are you mad?
America has got _the_ constitution _par excellence_. America is always
talking about its Constitution."

To which an Englishman, if he were tactless, would say "America is
always talking about its Constitution; but as it is also always amending
its Constitution, it looks as if that Constitution were not quite so
perfect as you seem to suppose."

When you came to examine the American Constitution, you found that it
was not really a Constitution but only a Charter of Anarchism. It was
not an instrument of government: it was a guarantee to the whole
American nation that it never should be governed at all. And that is
exactly what the Americans want.

The ordinary man--we have to face it: it is every bit as true of the
ordinary Englishman as of the ordinary American--is an Anarchist. He
wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he
himself doesnt want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government
officials and policemen. He loathes tax collectors. He shrinks from
giving anybody any official power whatever. This Anarchism has been at
work in the world since the beginnings of civilization; and its supreme
achievement up to date is the American Constitution.

It is a formidable instrument, explicit in black and white. In England
we have the British Constitution; but nobody knows what it is: it is not
written down anywhere; and you can no more amend it than you can amend
the east wind. But in the United States you have a real tangible
readable document. I can nail you down to every one of its sentences.

And what does it amount to? A great protest against the tyranny of law
and order. A final manifesto from the centuries of revolutionary
Anarchism in which the struggle went on against government as such,
against government by feudal barons, by autocratic Kings, by the Pope
and his cardinals, by the parliaments which have gradually ousted all
these authorities, each of them in turn being used to disable the others
in the glorified cause of what people called Liberty, until, having
destroyed the king, the barons, the Church, and finally all effective
parliamentary governing power, you found yourselves hopelessly under the
thumbs of your private racketeers, from the humble gunman to the great
financial magnate, each playing for his own hand without status, without
national authority or responsibility, without legal restraint and
without any sense of public government. You had perfected a Constitution
of negatives to defend liberty, liberty, liberty--life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness--against the only checks on anarchy that could
secure them, and fortified it by a Supreme Court which dealt out nothing
but prohibitions, and a political party machinery of legislatures and
senates, which was so wonderfully devised that when you sent in one body
of men to govern the country, you sent in another body of men along with
them to prevent their doing it. In your dread of dictators you
established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator,
every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with
the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public
responsibility.

And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government,
you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call
Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put
on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

Still, I must not reproach you; for you might remind me that you took
your Anarchism straight from England, parliament, party system, second
chamber and all, and that we are just as incapable as you of doing
anything as a nation except talk, talk, talk endlessly. But I do
reproach you for a special American propaganda of Anarchism which is
having most serious effects throughout the world. Formerly you were not
able to affect public morals and public feeling much on the other side
of the Atlantic. But now you have an instrument called the cinematograph
and a centre called Hollywood, which has brought public and private
morals under your influence everywhere.

An eminent American, whom I will not name, has sent me a letter which I
received yesterday morning. It says "Do not judge the United States by
its two plague spots: Hollywood and New York."

I was not surprised. Hollywood is the most immoral place in the world.
But you do not realize this, because the moment I use the word
"immoral," every American begins to think of ladies' underclothing. So
please do not suppose that I am talking of that very necessary thing,
sex appeal, the use of which in the theatre and in the cinema is most
desirable, provided it be well done, and the sex appeal made really
educational, as it can be.

No: the doctrine with which Hollywood is corrupting the world is the
doctrine of Anarchism. Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a
string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating
and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or
disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal
code of manly conduct, is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.

Why do you not prosecute the film corporations for inciting all our
youths to breaches of the peace? Why do you applaud these screen heroes
who, when they are not kissing the heroine, are socking jaws? It is a
criminal offence to sock a citizen in the jaw. When shall we see a film
issuing from Hollywood in which the hero acts like a civilized man, and,
instead of socking somebody in the jaw, calls a policeman?

I notice that you receive this coldly. You think perhaps that the
policeman would bore you. He could never bore you, at his very worst,
ladies and gentlemen, as those eternal socks in the jaw bore me, and
bore every civilized person. Try to get rid of them. Above all, try to
get rid of the ignorant Anarchism that is at the back of them--that
notion that moral law is something that every man may take into his own
hands as judge and jury in his own case, and execute with his own fist.

Besides, my observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous
people who are good at socking jaws. The Providence which is on the side
of the big battalions is also apt to favor the quickest and hardest
hitters.

But now let us get back to the American Constitution. People are
beginning to find out that Constitution. The Hundredpercent American is
being succeeded by a more highly developed American. He is more muscular
and less adipose than the Hundredpercent American. He has the same
imposing presence, the same eloquence, the same vitality, the same
dignity, the same enthusiasm. But his dignity is not pompous; and his
enthusiasm is attached to definite measures and not to selections from
the poetry and rhetoric of the day before yesterday.

I hope Mr. Franklin Roosevelt is a sample of that new American. I think
my friend Mr. William Randolph Hearst anticipated him years ago. At all
events I mention these two gentlemen not only because they illustrate
what I mean, but because the main symptom of the change is that they are
both very violently against the Constitution. President Roosevelt is
appealing to you at the present time to get rid of your confounded
Constitution, and give him power to govern the country. He hopes that if
you do he will be able to govern it. But he knows he must fail as long
as Congress is there to prevent him.

You have tried constitutional presidents before, ladies and gentlemen.
You have tried again and again. You tried Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover had
shewn himself a capable and practical man in certain transactions,
connected with feeding people during the war. On that ground you elected
him. You wanted a practical man. You were in a practical mood.

You found him of no use whatever as President. He ceased to be a
practical man. Congress would not let him be a practical man. The
Constitution was not practical. Everything ended in talk, talk, talk.
Then, during his term of office, you had a bad slump. Your political,
social and industrial system registered signs of a first-rate earthquake
somewhere; and when the Constitution made it impossible for Mr. Hoover
to save you, you revenged yourself on him by throwing him out. I suppose
I must not say you kicked him out, but you certainly sent him to the
foot of the poll with extraordinary violence. And then you turned to Mr.
Roosevelt. Why?

Because, as the practical mood in which you elected Mr. Hoover was a
disappointment, you reacted into a sentimental mood. Just then Mr.
Roosevelt, by a happy chance, got photographed with a baby. The baby was
a success: Mr. Roosevelt went to the White House in its arms. I dont
know whether the baby is still there; but I know that you hope a great
deal from Mr. Franklin Roosevelt. Well, you will get nothing from him if
he has to act constitutionally through the usual routine of Congress.
His four years will inevitably end in as great a disappointment as Mr.
Hoover's.

In the meantime, Mr. Hoover has gone back into practical business life
where things are meant to be done, and has been discovered again to be
perfectly successful as a practical man.

The body I am speaking for here to-night--by the way, it is not
responsible for everything I say--is the Academy of Political Science.
What is its first and most pressing job? Evidently to smash the American
Constitution. To get rid of it at all hazards.

That seems easy enough, because your Constitution has for a long time
been getting rid of itself bit by bit through endless amendments. But it
cannot be wholly discarded until this Academy achieves the far more
difficult feat of supplying a new Constitution. That is what it is for.
It has no other purpose. And will you kindly tell all your friends that
there is such a thing as political science, because most of them dont
know it. They know that there is such a thing as electioneering; and
perhaps they occasionally take part in one of those scandalous and
disgusting spectacles that are called election meetings, at which sane
and sober men yell senselessly until any dispassionate stranger looking
at them would believe that he was in a lunatic asylum for exceptionally
dreadful cases of mental derangement. I hope you all look forward to the
time when such disgraces will become impossible in this and every other
country. I am speaking now from guilty experience. I have stood on
election platforms; I have made speeches; I have had audiences rising
with enthusiasm at the conclusion of my addresses and singing "For He's
a Jolly Good Fellow!" You will not do that at the conclusion of my
present speech, because you dont know the tune in this country. You need
not regret it; for my candidates were mostly defeated. But defeated or
not I have never spoken nor listened at an election meeting without
being ashamed of the whole sham democratic routine. The older I grow the
more I feel such exhibitions to be, as part of the serious business of
the government of a nation, entirely intolerable and disgraceful to
human nature and civic decency.

I am listening to the curious dead silence which shews that you all
agree with me, but that you are rather doubtful (_applause_)--Ah! There
it comes!

If you feel that way there may be some hope for the Academy of Political
Science after all. But I must warn you that it is very doubtful whether
Man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious
and efficient political constitution. It is an open question, I quite
admit. So far, all the evidence is against it.

Within my lifetime our knowledge of history has been greatly extended.
We used to be taught that antiquity meant the Roman Empire, which had
absorbed the Greek city States with the pyramids of Egypt looking on,
and with Jerusalem and a sketchy Babylonian collection of idolators in
the hinterland. The one belief that we got out of it all was that modern
civilization was an immense improvement on those barbarous times, and
that all white people had been steadily progressing, getting less and
less superstitious, less and less savage, more and more enlightened,
until the pinnacle had been reached, represented by ourselves.

We are now beginning to have serious doubts whether we ourselves are in
any way remarkable or unprecedented as specimens of political
enlightenment; for our new knowledge of history tells us that our
picture of the past was false. Thanks largely to the researches of
Professor Flinders Petrie, we know of five or six ancient civilizations
which were just like our own civilization, having progressed in the same
way, to the same artistic climaxes, the same capitalistic climaxes, the
same democratic and feminist climaxes as we; and they all perished. They
reached a certain point and then collapsed, because they had no
internal stability. When they grew into huge populations crowded into
big cities without equality of class or income the internal strains set
up by the inequalities shattered them, and civilization sank back again
into primitive life for the survivors.

That puts us in a very different mental attitude from our fathers and
grandfathers, because what we are up against now is the fact that we too
have reached the edge of the precipice over which these civilizations
fell and were dashed to pieces. There is no mistaking the situation: the
symptoms are the same; the difficulties are the same; and the
possibilities of rapid destruction are much greater. Are we going to
bridge the gulf or fall helplessly into it? Can we, if I may change the
metaphor, steer our ship round the headlands on which all the ancient
navigators were wrecked?

I dont know whether we are or not, ladies and gentlemen. I have very
often expressed an opinion that it does not very much matter whether we
do or not, because if we fail, some other sort of creature will appear
on the earth to carry on the work that has beaten us. You see, I do
not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six
thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all
the time. I believe that if mankind proves, for the fifth or sixth time
to our present knowledge, that it is a hopeless political failure, then
the same power that created us will create a race capable of getting
round the headlands and making America a political success. And if that
supermanly race be provided with a gun, I am afraid we shall be the
first victims of its superior intelligence and superior power.

But we must not and indeed cannot proceed on the assumption that we are
failures. We may have suspicions of our own shortcomings; but we are
bound to try to get round these headlands. The Academy of Political
Science is organized to try to find out how to do it. Why have we not
done it already? What is wrong with us? And assuming that we find out
what is wrong with us, have we the strength of character to remedy it?

This brings me back to the Hundredpercent American. To some extent he is
a pet of mine. I have always rather liked him, because he has some
promising qualities. For instance, he has enormous hospitality. I used
to feel personally complimented by the amazing warm-hearted hospitality
showered on me by Americans. But its scope is so boundless that I now
perceive that it lies in the nature of the host rather than in the
quality of the guest. Even women are hospitable in America. An American
woman seems to have no other object in life than to fill her house with
other people, even when she does the cooking herself. When I realized
it, I began to say to myself, "This is not a recognition of my own
particular merits. Nor is it quite a mania. There is something bigger
behind it. An enormous social instinct must be seeking satisfaction
through it."

Then I considered your rage for publicity. An American has no sense of
privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the
country. The English have it very strongly. An Englishman very often
fails in business where an American would succeed, because the
Englishman, when he opens a shop, or hotel, or any other place of public
resort, instead of welcoming a customer, cannot help treating him as an
unwarrantable intruder who has come into his shop without a proper
introduction. The American does not feel like that. He has public
instinct, social feeling. You see it not only in his hospitality, but in
his love of lectures and public meetings, his eagerness to hear anybody
who will talk and shake hands with him afterwards. You, ladies and
gentlemen, have just parted with sums of money that are quite
considerable during the present crisis. What to do? To hear me talk. You
did not know what I was going to say. You guessed that I should not hand
you the usual visitor's bouquets. But you love talk because there is
something public about it. There is promise of public action in it. And
I, having watched this through my long life, have begun to see that it
is also a force which may turn into volcanic political genius if it gets
mixed with brains and knowledge.

If only it can get a positive Constitution, if it can find sound
intellectual bearings, if it can devise (again I quote the
mathematicians) a frame of reference within which its brains can work,
possibly America may save human society yet by solving the great
political problems which have baffled and destroyed all previous
attempts at permanent civilization. I have hopes, because America has
got this irrepressible social instinct, this wonderful surging thing
inside itself, that you do not find in the same reckless profusion
elsewhere. Will that carry you through? Has America the entrails to do
the job? If I were in England I should use a shorter word; but in
America I am told I must be careful.

You know, if you study American history--not the old history books; for
almost all American histories, until very lately, were mere dustbins of
the most mendacious vulgar journalism--but the real history of America,
you will be ashamed of it because the real history of all mankind is
shameful. But there is hope in bits of it. I wonder how many of you have
ever studied the history of the Latter Day Saints: one of the most
extraordinary episodes in the white settlement of the world. You should
do so; for it shews Americans doing something for reasons which would
astonish me very much if I saw the same thing being done for the same
reasons in England.

There was a time when the Mormons were so few in number that they were
in very great danger of being killed by their pious neighbors because
their views were unpopular. But they were themselves a very pious
people. They were brought up with the strictest old-fashioned ideas with
regard to the relations of the sexes and the sanctity of marriage:
marriage, of course, being the established monogamous marriage of the
Christian west.

Well, their leader went to these pious men and women and said to them "I
want you to take to polygamy. I want all you men to have as many wives
as you can possibly afford instead of one wife."

Think what a terrific thing that was to say to such people! I do not
know any more moving passage in literature than that in which Brigham
Young describes how, after receiving this appalling order, he met a
funeral on his way home and found himself committing the mortal sin of
envying the dead. And yet Brigham Young lived to have a very large
number of wives according to our ideas--thirty something, I think it
was--and to become immortal in history as an American Moses by leading
his people through the wilderness into an unpromised land where they
founded a great city on polygamy.

Now nothing can be more idle, nothing more frivolous, than to imagine
that this polygamy had anything to do with personal licentiousness. If
Joseph Smith had proposed to the Latter Day Saints that they should live
licentious lives, they would have rushed on him and probably anticipated
the pious neighbors who presently shot him. The significant point in the
case was that the reason he gave them was a purely political reason. He
said "Unless we multiply our numbers, we are lost; and we can multiply
our numbers rapidly only by polygamy. And, therefore, whatever our
prejudices, whatever our feelings may be, if we are to save the Church
of the Latter Day Saints from annihilation by the superior numbers of
its enemies in this State, we must take to polygamy."

And they did it. That was the wonderful American thing. A body of
Americans were capable of changing their lives and discarding their most
deeply rooted ideas for a purely political reason! That makes some of
you laugh. I am very glad. Whenever in the search for truth I hit the
nail exactly on the head, there is always a laugh at first; but nothing
that I shall say to-night is more significant than that illustration of
American capacity for political action, in view of the necessity to the
United States of a new Constitution. I really do entertain a hope--I
think I am the only person in the world who entertains it so
far--perhaps after my preaching to-night some of you may consider
it--that you Americans, in spite of your follies in the past, in spite
of your obsolete Uncle Jonathan, in spite of your ridiculous
Hundredpercent American, may yet take the lead in political thought and
action, and help to save the soul of the world.

I admit that your existing situation is not a very promising one. Your
proletariat is unemployed. That means the breakdown of your capitalist
system, because, as any political scientist will tell you, the whole
justification of the system of privately appropriated capital and land
on which you have been working, is its guarantee, elaborately reasoned
out on paper by the capitalist economists, that although one result of
it must be the creation of a small but enormously rich propertied class
which is also an idle class, living at the expense of the propertyless
masses who are getting only a bare living, nevertheless that bare living
is always secured for them. There must always be employment available;
and they will always be able to obtain a subsistence wage for their
labor.

When that promise is broken (and never for one moment has it been kept
right up to the hilt), when your unemployed are not only the old
negligible five per cent. of this trade, eight per cent. of that trade,
two per cent. of the other trade, but millions of unemployed, then the
capitalist system has broken down; and your most pressing job is to find
a better one.

Passing from your starving proletariat, what about your farmers? Your
farmers are bankrupt; and they are in armed revolt. Even the newspapers
tell you this if you read them carefully, although in all civilized
countries at present newspapers exist for the purpose of concealing the
truth from the public in such matters.

What about your employers? When I was a young man, the employer in
America was master of the industrial situation. He employed the
proletariat on his own account and for his own profit. He employed the
land of the landlord and paid him a rent for it. He employed the capital
of the capitalists and paid them interest for it. What remained was his
own. Thus he had the whole business of the country in his hands, and
was undisputed cock of the walk in all industrial republics. And any man
who could read and write and cipher, and had a reasonable share of
business ability, could start as an employer with a little capital
either saved by himself or borrowed from his family or his friends.

All that is gone. The ordinary employer of to-day belongs to the
proletariat. He is an employed manager, living on a salary with perhaps
a percentage to encourage him to work for others as hard as he formerly
did for himself. Scientific discovery has revealed new methods of
producing wealth which require enormous plants costing prodigious
amounts of capital. The old-fashioned employer was a very considerable
person when he could command a capital of five thousand dollars. To-day
the dollars needed to start big enterprises are counted in hundreds of
millions; and the ordinary employer is utterly unable to find such sums
or to prevent the big enterprises swallowing up his little ones. He has,
therefore, fallen helplessly into the power of a class of men whose
business it is to find millions, the financiers. They are the present
masters of the situation. Your country is run by them. Just now they
are running it into the ditch; but you still let them run it.

To impress on you how extraordinarily dangerous is the condition of a
country which lets itself be governed by private financiers, may I shew
you the sort of person a private financier is? He is the very contrary
of a statesman. The financier is always thinking about what a single
individual with money can do at a favorable moment if it pleases him.
But the statesman has to consider what millions of individuals, with or
without money, can be forced by law to do every day whether they like it
or not. That is how the financier's mind forms fixed habits which make
him incapable of the point of view of the statesman, who has to remember
at every legislative step "Here is something that everybody, rich or
poor, will have to do simultaneously if I make this law."

Now, one of the things that somebody can always do, and that everybody
can never do is this. Suppose you have a little pension--for simplicity
I will put it at five dollars a year--and you say "This pension of five
dollars is not much: I would rather have a big spree and be done with
it; or I would like to start a little business with it." Accordingly
you go to the ordinary rank-and-file financier called a stockbroker, and
say "Look here. I have a settled income of five dollars a year; but I
want to raise a hundred dollars. Could you get me a hundred dollars for
my five dollars a year?" The stockbroker will reply "Certainly. It is
perfectly easy. I shall just find somebody who has a hundred dollars
more than he need spend, and would like to exchange it for an addition
of five dollars a year to his permanent income. Nothing simpler. It is
done every day."

Wall Street and the Stock Exchanges and the Bourses are only large
markets in which people exchange incomes for ready money just in this
way. One man's spare money buys him an addition to his income; and
another man's income buys him a lump sum of ready money. The vast
majority who have neither independent incomes to sell nor ready money to
spare are not concerned nor considered at all.

The professional financier who is doing this kind of business all the
time--whose mind and soul are steeped in Wall Street and the Stock
Exchanges, gets a fixed habit of multiplying all the resources of the
country on paper by twenty. You see the process. To him every man who
has five dollars a year is worth a hundred dollars. He is quite certain
of that, because he knows that at any moment he can go into the money
market and obtain a hundred dollars in exchange for an income of five
dollars. He knows also that twenty times five make a hundred. And there
you are!

What happens when you make your financiers statesmen? Their first duty
is to find out how much taxation you can bear. For that they must find
out how much wealth there is in your hands to tax. They order a clerk to
calculate the entire wealth of the United States. The clerk immediately
finds out from the income tax returns what is the total income of the
country, multiplies it by twenty, and hands in the product as the wealth
available for immediate taxation in the United States. Not having a
statesman's mind he forgets that if all the people with incomes are
driven by law to sell them simultaneously, the Stock Exchange will
become a market in which there are all sellers and no buyers, and the
value of their securities will be just exactly zero.

That is to say, financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on
something which they call the capital of the country which has no
existence. Every five dollars they count as a hundred dollars; and that
means that every financier, every banker, every stockbroker, is 95 per
cent. a lunatic. And it is in the hands of these lunatics that you leave
the fate of your country!

You also give them a certain hidden power, greater than any public
political power, which exists in all large and rich commercial
communities. That power is the power latent in banking. How does it
arise? Very simply. In a village people can keep their spare money, if
they have any, in an old stocking, or bury it in the back garden; but in
towns men of business have to handle large sums which they want to have
kept safely for them and paid out to their order as and when they need
it. They began by leaving their money with the goldsmiths, who were
quite willing to keep it for them and let them have it when they had
payments to make. You see, the goldsmiths discovered, not by the
exercise of any skill on their part, but simply by experiencing what
happened, that if they had a large number of people leaving money with
them and never drawing it all out--keeping a balance as we call
it--they would have a lot of other people's money to play with all the
time. Take my own case. I am only a private professional man; but it is
necessary for the conduct of my business and household that I always
keep at my bank about 1,000 at call. When the sum falls below that I
replenish it. The consequence is that my banker is in a permanent
condition of having 1,000 of mine; and if you add to my poor
professional man's little 1,000 the huge balances needed by the big
industrial corporations, and the multitude of modest margins from the
smaller fry, you will see how when the goldsmiths became bankers they
found that an astonishing proportion of the money lodged with them
remained permanently in their hands, enabling them to enter on the most
lucrative of all businesses: the business of money-lending with other
people's money.

They ran only one risk, and that was that if all their customers were
seized with panic and made a simultaneous rush to draw out their money,
the money would not be there; and the bank would break, just as the Bank
of England broke the other day because there was a run on gold. But this
occurs so seldom that the risk is negligible; and as the Bank of
England is still able to pay twelve or thirteen shillings in the pound,
its bankruptcy is politely called going off the gold standard.

But now you see that this natural discovery made by the goldsmiths and
exploited by them as bankers, sets up automatically in large
civilizations like yours a money power so irresistible that it becomes a
political and industrial power, not to say a religious power, of the
most formidable magnitude. Any nation that leaves this power in the
hands of irresponsible private men to use simply for their own
enrichment, is either politically ignorant or politically mad to the
utmost possible degree.

You applaud; but this is exactly what you are doing. The smallest
smattering of political science will tell you that the first thing you
must do to get out of your present mess is to nationalize your banks.
Well, why not nationalize them instead of merely applauding me?

All the political advice given by financiers since the War, has, as you
know, been wrong advice. There has been only one great man in the
banking world, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England; and he has said
the final banker's word about the money problem. That word is "I dont
understand it." No wonder; for there is no problem to understand. Money
is just what it always was and always will be.

I must mention one or two other delusions from which financiers suffer.
If you read the money articles in the papers, you will notice that the
prosperity of a country is always measured at present by the money it
receives for its exports. "A favorable balance of trade" is what the
financiers clamor for; and by a favorable balance of trade they mean an
excess of exports over imports. Now this seems reasonable enough to
people who think in terms of money. To people who think in terms of
goods it is raving nonsense. Foreign trade is nothing but barter
conducted with money; and to maintain that in barter the more you give
and the less you get in exchange the more prosperous you are, is to
qualify yourself for the asylum. Yet in America and England it qualifies
you for the Cabinet. A financier cannot think in terms of bread and
butter or bricks and mortar: he thinks in figures. He has never been
inside a factory or down a mine or on a farm. Sending goods out of the
country means to him nothing but attracting money into it. His ideal is
a country which exports everything it produces, and gets nothing in
return but title deeds to gold, of which you in America have too much
already.

This craze for getting money into the country makes the financier very
keen on foreign investments. To begin with, he makes a good deal of
money by floating foreign loans; and the first effect of the foreign
loan is to stimulate exports. But the ultimate effect is to annihilate
exports by producing a state of things in which the nation lives on an
income which comes from abroad as interest on the foreign loan, and
exports nothing in return. The financier is caught in his own trap; and
you are caught with him. He wants more exports, more exports, and still
more exports. To stimulate them he organizes foreign investments which
mean more imports, more imports, and still more imports. He is working
at the same time for a policy of producing and exporting everything, and
for a policy of importing everything and producing nothing.

The result of these two contrary impulses struggling in his brain is,
that you revere him as an omniscient master of finance when he has
reduced himself to nothing but a neurotic gambler with an insoluble
complex. If it were not that his left hand is continually undoing the
work of his right he would have ruined you long ago.

What are the risks of this policy of stimulating exports, and judging
your prosperity solely by their excess over imports? They are quite
incompatible with international peace and domestic prosperity. Foreign
competition is always trying to take away the markets for your exports.
That leads to war in the long run. If you lose your markets, you have to
go after fresh markets; and that leads to imperial invasion and conquest
abroad. Foreign trade also brings your own workers into competition with
the poorest workers on earth. The coolie who works for two cents a day
sets the standard of life for your own proletariat; and that leads to
strikes, riots, and civil war.

So much for the risks of the export policy. Now what about the imports?
Suppose by the advice of your financial experts you send all your
capital out of the United States to the places where labor is cheapest,
and settle down to live on the interest from foreign investments,
ceasing to produce industrial profits, or to produce even your own food!
Well, that is a golden prospect, is it not? All America would be like
Atlantic City. The whole coast would become a magnificent Miami Beach.
You would have music, dancing, night clubs; you would have beautifully
dressed girls; you would live in hotels with jazz bands and cabarets at
every meal when you were not cruising round the world in perpetual
sunshine in luxury liners. Quite a paradise, wouldnt it be? A great many
people appear to think so. It would not suit me personally; but I am
notoriously eccentric.

Well, what are the risks, if any, of that? They are rather serious. For
instance, repudiation by the other countries of the interest on which
you are living! You may have repudiation with revolution as in Russia.
You may have repudiation without revolution as in France, which has
calmly repudiated 80 per cent. of her War loan. And what about the
politer form of repudiation known as foreign income tax? Every foreign
country has an unlimited power of taxing at the source all the dividends
payable out of its industries. It can levy a tax of a hundred cents on
every dollar. You used to tax my Liberty Loan unblushingly; and you
still tax my hard earned royalties on the ground that it is your actors
and printers who do the hard earning. There is even a risk of war to
wipe the slate. The countries on which you are depending may find it
cheaper to fight you and get rid of the burden, with a chance of being
able to live on you instead of allowing you to live on them. And then
where are you? You have become a wonderful night clubby sort of nation;
but there is nothing so helpless as a raided night club.

Yet your financiers are always driving you in this direction, just as by
another road they are driving you in the opposite direction. Either way
they are tempting you to run the most terrible risks, risks which will
eventually destroy you if you persist. But do not blame the financiers.
They are quite honest and patriotic. They do it in their own business,
and it works; and they think if it is done in everybody's business it
must work. That is why you must breed statesmen who will supersede the
financier and put him back in his proper private place.

Let me take a capital instance. We had a war in Europe. You lent Europe
about five milliards of dollars, on England's security. What value did
you get for that? You got the destruction of three European empires, and
the substitution of American republicanism for monarchical rule as the
typical national rule in Europe. Most European Kings are now exiles and
outcasts. The rest are what you call constitutional monarchs, which
means that they are not monarchs at all, and consequently have a fairly
pleasant and popular time of it. I suggest that this was pretty fair
value for your money. But you got something more remarkable than that,
that will be yet more important in the future: you achieved the
salvation of Russia. I gather from your applause that at last I have met
some Americans who know that they saved Russia.

Russia, when the tsardom fell, tried your form of government. It set up
what it calls a bourgeois republic. The country was in the most
desperate need of reconstruction; but the bourgeois republic could do
nothing but talk, just like Congress. It collapsed helplessly when the
Bolsheviks took the situation in hand and imposed a real positive
government on the distracted and starving country. That government had a
terrible job to face. There was Russia with her population of one
hundred and sixty million ignorant and half savage peasants, knowing
nothing about modern industrial development, not knowing how to handle
machinery. There had been a little industrialism before the war; but it
was all in the hands of Englishmen, of Belgians, of Italians, and of
Germans. Yet when the new Russian rulers, having to rescue this enormous
population from famine, savagery, ignorance, dirt and slavery, could do
so only by establishing the machinery of modern industry in Russia at
all costs, and did not know how to do it, did they turn for instruction
to their old exploiters, the English, the Belgians, the Italians, and
the Germans? No. By some sort of inspiration, they turned to America;
and America saved them. They were guided by the advice and instruction
of your American efficiency engineers. The American efficiency engineers
did not flatter them. They came and looked, and said "Your condition is
appalling: you are making a disastrous mess of your attempts at modern
machine industry. It seems utterly impossible that you should ever get
out of that mess. We can tell you what to do; but whether your untrained
peasants can do it is another matter." And they told them. I know the
American who took to Moscow the very remarkable report in which the
information was given. That gentleman passed through London on his way,
and submitted the report to some English experts. The English experts
made some valuable suggestions; but they said "Do you suppose the
Russians will tolerate such an exposure of their inefficiency as this?
Go and hand in your report, and they will hand you back across the
frontier the next day. They will suppress that report; and nobody will
ever hear of it again."

Well, your fellow countrymen, representing an able American firm, said
"That will not matter to us. The Russians have paid for a report; we
shall give it to them; and they can do what they like with it. They can
suppress it as an English or American government would; but at any rate
they will get what they paid for and get it good."

The English experts were mistaken. Within forty-eight hours of the
handing in of the report in Moscow, the Russians had ten thousand
printed copies of it in circulation; and their loud speakers all over
the country were shouting out the lessons of the report and telling the
Russian workmen that all the waste and breakages and blundering must
stop, and that they must learn how to operate and care for their own
machines. American workmen were invited to Russia to teach factory work,
and American managers to teach factory management; and now, as you know,
Russia has pulled through, even though her American teachers said that
it was hardly conceivable that she could under the circumstances. You
see, the Russian producers were free from the frightful friction of
competition that wastes so much in our countries, where every manager is
fighting for profit against every other manager, and every factory
divided against itself by class conflict. The Russians pulled through
because they all pulled together; and the result is that they are now
one of the biggest industrial powers in the world, thanks to America.

                    *       *       *       *       *

Some of you may say candidly "This is very gratifying in a way; but did
we quite intend to do it?" Well, perhaps not; but may not the blind
political instinct which I have given you credit for have carried you on
in spite of yourselves to do the right thing? At all events you helped
to establish Communism in Russia; and it is now very important to you
that Communism should continue in Russia; for have you considered,
ladies and gentlemen, what your condition would be if Russia, with all
its new resources, were forced back into imperialist capitalism?

In my young days we were all mortally afraid of Russia. We talked about
the Will of Peter the Great. Mr. Rudyard Kipling made his reputation as
a patriotic laureate by denouncing the great White Bear, the power that
meant to get its claws on India as a prelude to getting its claws on all
Asia and dominating the whole world. I ask the mischievously foolish
short-sighted gentlemen who write in the American newspapers denouncing
Russia, telling every sort of silly lie about Russia, pretending that
Russian Communism is bankrupt and the people starving, what they think
they are doing? Do they want the tsardom back again? Tsar or no Tsar, do
they want to start a Russian capitalist rgime to compete with our own
capitalists for our markets? Do they want to dig up the White Bear from
his Communist grave and resuscitate him with all his claws sharpened
tenfold?

What would be the effect if they succeeded? Suppose you sweep out Mr.
Stalin as the monarchical Allies swept out Napoleon in 1815, and replace
him by a dynastic Grand Duke and a government of old-fashioned
diplomatists working with old-fashioned financiers, under the thumbs of
old-fashioned capitalists fighting for new markets with the invincible
Red Army created by Trotsky! What will you have to do next? You will
have to quadruple your fleet. You will have to decuple your air force
probably. You will not be able to sleep for dread of the White Bear.

Fortunately, Providence, having a kindly eye on America, has made Russia
a Communist State; and as long as it remains so you have nothing to fear
from it. Your only anxiety ought to be as to what is going to happen in
China; and I sincerely hope for your sake that China will settle its
scattered affairs by developing its present nucleus of Communism over
its entire territory, so that China and Russia will be Communist powers.
Then every American can sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and
none shall make him afraid. If you cannot appreciate American Communism,
at least learn to appreciate the benefit to America of having other
countries Communistic. Think of the United States with not only Japan
capitalist, but Russia capitalist and China capitalist! You may well
shudder.

Now let us return to the war debt. You want to get your money back.
Well, the French owe you a lot of it. The French, following the example
of most of the other States in Europe, tell you they are not going to
pay: they will see you in Hades first. What is your remedy? It is the
familiar one of occupation and distraint. You can send over your United
States Army to occupy France, and levy the sums due to you on the
inhabitants. If France objects she can put fifteen million negro
soldiers into the field against you without risking the life of a single
Frenchman. Not much of a remedy that: is it? You must make the best of
the flat fact that France _can_ pay you and wont. I daresay France will
be nice enough to tip you perhaps a few million francs: the franc is
worth four cents. You will have to accept it and look as pleasant about
it as you can.

Now, England owes you more than France. But England does not refuse to
pay. Like France she can pay; and you know that she can. But you
sometimes use a very thin argument. You say "If you English can afford
to spend five hundred million dollars a year on an army and navy, you
can afford to pay us what you owe us."

To that we reply "Come now, good old Stars and Stripes: you are spending
six hundred million dollars a year on _your_ army and navy. Can you
blame us for doing the same? You say to us 'Give up your soldiering; and
then we will see about letting you off your debt.' Suppose we say 'Give
up your racketeering; and then perhaps we will consider about paying.
What is the use of paying you money to racketeer with?'" I wish I could
tell you the figure which has been stated by one of your public men as
the cost of racketeering in your country every year. I refrain because I
came here firmly resolved that not a single word should pass my lips
which could give the slightest offence to any American.

I might tell you that we in England are paying more than double the cost
of our armaments every year in unearned incomes, even after deducting
what we take back in taxation. But that is a delicate subject for both
of us. The fundamental objection to making us pay is that we cannot do
it without pauperizing you. Remember our own predicament when we tried
to make Germany pay. The Germans said "Well, you know that we have no
gold in Germany to pay you with. What will you take instead?"

We said "Pay in ships. Build ships. We need ships."

So they started paying in ships. Presently our Prime Minister found that
all the ship-building yards on Tees and Tyne and Clyde had stopped work.
The Germans had been given their job. The shipmasters and their workmen
objected. The Prime Minister said "This must stop. You mustnt pay us in
ships."

The Germans said "Well, what shall we pay you in? Shall we pay you in
steel?"

The Prime Minister said "Yes: steel seems all right." But the British
steel smelters said "No: it is not all right. You dont send any German
steel in here to ruin us."

The Prime Minister then said to his staff "Will you kindly tell me what
I am to ask these people to pay in? It must be something that we do not
produce ourselves." So his staff said "Potash." The Prime Minister
accordingly said to the Germans "You must pay in potash."

Imagine a nation being called on to pay the cost of a European war in
potash! Imagine the British Isles snowed under a mountain of potash!
There was only one thing that could be taken from Germany without
ruining some industry or another, and that was gold. So the Germans had
to get gold in any way they could; and all the financiers said
"Splendid! we will lend them the gold." That was a typical financier's
solution: levy a colossal tribute on a defeated and penniless
population, and prove their ability to pay by lending them the money to
do it with! But what was the end of it? All the gold in the world poured
through Germany into England and through England into the United States,
which didnt need it. You, without knowing what you were doing, cornered
the gold of the world, and broke the Bank of England. Nobody in Europe
could get any more gold. You had it all here except what France held on
to; and if you persuade France to pay up a little of her debt to you,
she will only send you more gold. What use will it be to you? Ask your
armies of the unemployed.

Is it not clear that to the extent that we are sending you all this
gold, we are pauperizing you? We are carrying you further on the road
towards making the entire country an Atlantic City ringed round with a
Miami Beach. I seriously advise you to wipe the slate and be content
with having got rid of the three empires and set up Communism in Russia.
It is very good value for your money. Some of you may suspect me of
wanting to get a little off my income tax. But I get a taxed income from
the United States as well as from England; so what I shall gain on the
swings, I shall lose on the roundabouts.

And now, what are you going to do about it? Do you not feel, as I turn
these questions inside out for you, that you need an Academy of
Political Science very badly? And it must be an American Academy and not
a second-hand European one. About fifty years ago I and certain friends
of mine--all of whom, by the way, justified in after life their good
faith and their ability--established what is called Fabian Socialism in
England as a political creed. It was from end to end English. We knew
all about Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx and the Social-Democrats. We
knew all about Fourier and Proudhon and Blanqui in France. We knew about
Bakunin in Russia. But when we put our system before the English public
there was not a single word about Karl Marx or any other foreign
Socialist. From beginning to end Fabian Socialism was worked out on
English lines with English thought, on English facts.

I strenuously advise you, when you come to back up this Academy of
Political Science and to take your own part in its work of making a new
Constitution, to make it an American Constitution from beginning to end.
Dont bother about Karl Marx. Karl Marx was a mighty prophet; but almost
all the administrative mistakes the Communists have made in Russia they
have made for the sake of Marxist orthodoxy, whilst their success has
been established under the leadership of Stalin, who is distinguished by
the fact that he is a nationalist in Russia. Stalin says, in effect, "I
will establish Communism in Russia and thereby set an example to
Communists everywhere. If they do not choose to follow it, that is their
lookout and not mine: Russia is large enough for me; and I will work for
the salvation of Russia and leave the other countries to save their own
souls."

He is quite right. He has been successful along that line; and I suggest
to you that you in America should trust to that volcanic political
instinct which I have divined in you and work out the whole thing for
yourselves, from the American facts, with American thought, on American
lines, until you finally turn the futile Hundredpercent American into a
man who is not only one hundred per cent. an American but one hundred
per cent. a statesman.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, there must be an end, even to speeches by
Bernard Shaw. I have only to add that I am here to-night to pay back an
old debt that I owe to America. In my youth I was in reaction against
Fundamentalism, and combative for the advance of modern science and
modern thought in the opposite direction. I was very full of evolution,
of the new astronomical physics, and of the fine arts. But I knew
nothing about the economic foundations of society, nor their importance
in history and political science. Science was to me altogether outside
politics. I did not know that there was such a thing as political
science.

I went one night, quite casually, into a hall in London; and there I
heard a man deliver a speech which changed the whole current of my
life. That man was an American, Henry George. He was from San Francisco.
He had seen places like San Francisco grow up from mere camps into
enormously rich cities; and he had noticed that the richer they became,
the poorer they were. They had all got their politics into such a
tangle, that American growth in riches, American advance in what we call
civilization, was accompanied by an appalling reduction of the standard
of life of the people. Everywhere Progress meant Poverty.

Well, Henry George set me on the economic trail, the trail of political
science. Immediately afterwards I read Karl Marx and all the political
economists of that time; but it was the American Henry George who made
me do it; and therefore, as that was the beginning of my public life, I
have thought it fitting that at the end of it I should come and repay to
America a little of the impulse that Henry George gave me.

I have other debts to America. Some years afterwards, people even in
England were in a great muddle as to the sort of person I was, because,
not content with making one reputation, I had made about fifteen; and
the people who knew one reputation didnt know the others; so that
Bernard Shaw seemed to be a dozen different persons. I remained
incomprehensible until an American gentleman, the professor of
mathematics to whom I have already alluded, Professor Archibald
Henderson, presented me in a complete and intelligible shape to the
public. The effect of that was very beneficial to me in England. I
congratulated myself on having become one of the diversions of a
mathematician. As a consequence, I got into mathematical shape and
became a real person.

You now understand why, with almost every society in America asking me
to speak, I chose out this particular body, the Academy of Political
Science. It is the most important body in America to-day. The work that
it is doing is the work that will save America if anything can save
America. I shall not live to see that salvation; but I hope I have
prophesied it truly.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The author doesn't use an apostrophe in the words don't, doesn't, didn't
and wouldn't. The apostrophe has not been added.

The following change was made to the original text:
Page 5: specificially --> specifically

Minor variations in spelling and punctuation have been preserved.




[End of The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home,
by Bernard Shaw]
