war, when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this, as I remember it:

Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury have our lives and property in their hands.

Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that people should never be governed better than they want to be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but like all superior persons now I have to convince other people because I cannot compel them.

No elected body can possibly be representative, because no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional one. The House of Lords is more representative than the House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low. Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high standard of qualification, and should sit without votes though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.

These remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different from the way they read in cold type. I do hope the phonograph will be perfected before Shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. Otherwise his personality stands little chance of being understood.

Shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra leader uses a baton. His hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered into gray. His eyes are light blue. Between his brows there are three perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. His face is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least Mephistophelian as the caricaturists represent him. In short, Shaw is not so black as he is painted by himself and others.

It is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some of my "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", for me to give biographical details at any length, for these are easily accessible. Shaw has not been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces, and he is fortunate in having in Professor Henderson of the University of North Carolina a biographer of the Boswell kind—probably the best kind there is. His big volume contains as much about Shaw's life and words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know. Chesterton's book on Shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with the world", including Shaw. Other lives of Shaw are mentioned in the appendix of this chapter.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 25, 1856. His father was an Irish gentleman, Protestant, improvident and respectable, a wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail tradesmen. His mother was a musician, and it was to her that Mr. Shaw owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. When he went to London at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family by teaching music there. As Shaw says in one of his autobiographical fragments:

I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age. I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade.

His only schooling was at Dublin, where he says he learned little, and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the bottom of his class. His opinion of the sort of education he got he has expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "Misalliance."

My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but Greek and Latin.... To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short I am, as to classical education, another Shakespeare. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity, I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these three were never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards.

Why is it that British authors give us such horrible pictures of their school days? They usually look back upon them as a most unpleasant and unprofitable period of their lives, and when they attempt to eulogize it they make it all the more shocking. Kipling in "Stalky and Company" reveals an even more detestable state of affairs than Dickens does of "Dotheboys Hall." Shaw takes the American view of it and condemns with horror the "flagellomania" of the British schoolmaster. It is curious to observe that in Great Britain the schoolmasters have weapons, and the policemen have none. In America clubs have been given to the police, and the canes taken away from the teachers. The New York school-teachers are not allowed to deliver even a casual box on the ear or a friendly shaking, yet they are making very decent citizens out of most unpromising material, and the policemen's clubs are mostly used on the immigrants who have been trained in the flagellant schools of Europe.

It is doubtless a good thing that Shaw did not go through Oxford, but he should have had a course in biology under Huxley such as Wells had. This would have given him an acquaintance with the aims and methods of modern science and freed him from such prejudice as he displayed, for instance, in "The Doctor's Dilemma" and "The Philanderer."

Shaw's early efforts at authorship did not meet with encouragement. If we may take his word for it, he earned six pounds in nine years by his pen, and five of those came from writing a patent medicine advertisement. He wrote five novels in five years, all at first rejected by the book publishers. Four of them, "The Unsocial Socialist", "The Irrational Knot", "Cashel Byron's Profession", and "Love Among the Artists" have since been reprinted from the short-lived Socialist periodicals in which they originally appeared. The first novel he wrote, "Immaturity", has never been printed.

William Archer sent these novels to Robert Louis Stevenson, then trying to recover his health at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Stevenson's letters refer to them as "blooming gaseous folly", "horrid fun", "a fever dream of the most feverish",

"I say, Archer, my God, what women!" "If Mr. Shaw is below five and twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic and pursue romance with his eyes opened; perhaps he knows it; God knows!—my brain