had. Practically all the spare money in the country consists of a
mass of rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound
up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil
fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth,
commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you
can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical
individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our
money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls
when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them
conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the
Established Church first realizes that the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners receive the rents of sporting public houses,
brothels, and sweating dens; or that the most generous
contributor at his last charity sermon was an employer trading in
female labor cheapened by prostitution as unscrupulously as a
hotel keeper trades in waiters' labor cheapened by tips, or
commissionaire's labor cheapened by pensions; or that the only
patron who can afford to rebuild his church or his schools or
give his boys' brigade a gymnasium or a library is the son-in-law
of a Chicago meat King, that young clergyman has, like Barbara, a
very bad quarter hour. But he cannot help himself by refusing to
accept money from anybody except sweet old ladies with
independent incomes and gentle and lovely ways of life. He has
only to follow up the income of the sweet ladies to its
industrial source, and there he will find Mrs Warren's profession
and the poisonous canned meat and all the rest of it. His own
stipend has the same root. He must either share the world's guilt
or go to another planet. He must save the world's honor if he is
to save his own. This is what all the Churches find just as the
Salvation Army and Barbara find it in the play. Her discovery