It is a funny place, this world of Capitalism, with its astonishing spread of ignorance and helplessness, boasting all the time of its spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive; but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world. Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of Capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realize that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me. 43 DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW You must not conclude from what I have just said that I grudge the people their amusements. I have made most of my money by amusing them. I recognize more clearly than most people that not only does all work and no play make Jill a dull girl, but that she works so that she may be able to enjoy life as well as to keep herself from dying of hunger and exposure. She wants, and needs, leisure as well as wages. But breadwinning must come before charabancs and cinemas. I have the strongest sympathy, as I daresay you have, with the French gentleman who said that if he could have the luxuries of life he could do without the necessities; but unfortunately Nature does not share our sympathy, and ruthlessly puts breadwinning first on pain of death. The French gentleman is less important than the women who are asking for an eight-hour working day, because, though what they are really asking for is for a few hours more leisure when they have rested and slept, cooked and fed and washed up, yet they know that leisure must be worked for, and that no woman can shirk her share of the work except by putting it on some other woman and cutting short _her_ leisure.