that she is her father's accomplice; that the Salvation Army is
the accomplice of the distiller and the dynamite maker; that they
can no more escape one another than they can escape the air they
breathe; that there is no salvation for them through personal
righteousness, but only through the redemption of the whole
nation from its vicious, lazy, competitive anarchy: this
discovery has been made by everyone except the Pharisees and
(apparently) the professional playgoers, who still wear their Tom
Hood shirts and underpay their washerwomen without the slightest
misgiving as to the elevation of their private characters, the
purity of their private atmospheres, and their right to repudiate
as foreign to themselves the coarse depravity of the garret and
the slum. Not that they mean any harm: they only desire to be, in
their little private way, what they call gentlemen. They do not
understand Barbara's lesson because they have not, like her,
learnt it by taking their part in the larger life of the nation.


BARBARA'S RETURN TO THE COLORS.

Barbara's return to the colors may yet provide a subject for the
dramatic historian of the future. To go back to the Salvation
Army with the knowledge that even the Salvationists themselves
are not saved yet; that poverty is not blessed, but a most
damnable sin; and that when General Booth chose Blood and Fire
for the emblem of Salvation instead of the Cross, he was perhaps
better inspired than he knew: such knowledge, for the daughter of
Andrew Undershaft, will clearly lead to something hopefuller than
distributing bread and treacle at the expense of Bodger.