Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/47

21 THE INNOCENCE OF BERNARD SHAW 21 control of our military forces passes from the capitalist classes to the people ; that the disappearance of a variety of classes with a variety of what are now ridiculously called "public opinions" will be accompanied by the welding of society into one class with a public opinion of inconceivable weight ; that this public opinion will make it for the first time possible effectively to control the population ; that the economic independence of women, and the supplanting of the head of the household by the individual as the recognized unit of the State, will materially alter the status of children and the utility of the institution of the family ; and that the inevitable reconstitution of the State Church on a democratic basis may, for example, open up the possibility of the election of an avowed Free-thinker like Mr. John Morley or Mr. Bradlaugh to the deanery of Westminster. It is nothing but a series of separate statements, but they are so socketed that the result is torrential : the sentence seems positively to go whipping through its supporting semicolons much as a telegraph wire does through the posts when you watch it racing past from a swift train. And additional practice still, the months stretching into years, enabled him to eliminate even slotted frames and posts : in the paragraph that follows, written at the height of his powers, those recurrent " thats " have been replaced by absolutely imperceptible piers, so that as the reader's mind is carried over it experiences a helpless vertigo — it clutches its guide giddily, yielding him a blank sub- jection, like the limp obedience paid a Blondin by the fellow on his back — a far completer surrender (at any rate till we touch solid ground again) than the reverence offered to a Fors-Clavigerating Ruskin : — Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages